![]() Maggie Smith won an Oscar for capturing Brodie’s prim perfection: “She wore her loose brown tweed coat with the beaver collar tightly buttoned, her brown felt hat with the brim up at one side and down at the other.” Her curriculum consists of art, sex and fascism: “She was full of culture. Both fragile and indestructible she is forever fending off plots by Miss Mackay, the headmistress, who suspects (rightly) that Brodie is leading the Set astray. The magnetic Brodie is a spinster, engaged to young man killed on Flanders Field. ![]() They are Monica ‘famous mostly for mathematics’ Rose ‘famous for sex’ Eunice ‘famous for her spritely gymnastics Mary ‘whose fame rested on her being a lump’ and, finally, Sandy ‘notorious for her small, almost non-existent eyes and famous for her vowel sounds’. ![]() We meet them when they’re sixteen and the story flits backwards and forwards as the Set, still bound by events at school, recount her influence. The story follows the infamous Brodie Set – five girls each handpicked by Brodie to be her confidants in matters of romance and school politics. Only just long enough to count as a novella, you can read it in a morning yet it’s so densely packed with theology, art and psychology you’ll be mulling it for years. ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ is as outwardly modest and inwardly seething as the bourgeois Edinburgh Muriel Spark depicts so acutely. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |