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rootytootyrissa 's review for:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.
And who were the young lads talking to? None other than the hand-selected members of the Brodie Set--six young women under the tutelage and painstaking care of Jean Brodie, a woman in her prime. The girls are quite distinct: At that time they had been immediately recognisable as Miss Brodie's pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum, and useless to the school as a school. And that's all due to their unconventional teacher, Miss Jean Brodie.
Brodie, an unmarried and rather unconventional (much to the alarm of her fellows) school teacher, lives for the selection and upbringing of her Set: female pupils beneath her sheltering and educating wings. Though this might sound a bit like the enlightening and heart-warming story that takes place during say, Dead Poets' Society, that's where the similarities end. With ever-present but tongue-in-cheek dry wit, Muriel Spark paints the picture of Jean Brodie, who insists upon cultivating these young women by reinforcing her own ideas and lifestyle choices upon them--to the point where her own interest trips the lines of obsession and perhaps even brainwashing.
This book took me by surprise if I'm being honest. Muriel Spark's sense of humour and candidness caught me by the first page and the description of the defensive posturing of the boys, talking to girls. I'll admit firsthand I really enjoy Brit humour--and Muriel Spark had plenty of it to spare, particularly when it came to the description of each member of her set. She takes no pain in painting them in broad strokes, ones that she drives home again and again.
"You did well," said Miss Brodie to the class, when Miss Mackay had gone, "not to answer the question put to you. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?"
Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame, and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a fire, ventured, "Golden."
This is a short but golden wee story, enjoyable and light on the surface but also leaving some good messages in its wake about the impressionability of the young, and why perhaps it is best not to use them for your own vicarious lifestyle goals.
And who were the young lads talking to? None other than the hand-selected members of the Brodie Set--six young women under the tutelage and painstaking care of Jean Brodie, a woman in her prime. The girls are quite distinct: At that time they had been immediately recognisable as Miss Brodie's pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum, and useless to the school as a school. And that's all due to their unconventional teacher, Miss Jean Brodie.
Brodie, an unmarried and rather unconventional (much to the alarm of her fellows) school teacher, lives for the selection and upbringing of her Set: female pupils beneath her sheltering and educating wings. Though this might sound a bit like the enlightening and heart-warming story that takes place during say, Dead Poets' Society, that's where the similarities end. With ever-present but tongue-in-cheek dry wit, Muriel Spark paints the picture of Jean Brodie, who insists upon cultivating these young women by reinforcing her own ideas and lifestyle choices upon them--to the point where her own interest trips the lines of obsession and perhaps even brainwashing.
This book took me by surprise if I'm being honest. Muriel Spark's sense of humour and candidness caught me by the first page and the description of the defensive posturing of the boys, talking to girls. I'll admit firsthand I really enjoy Brit humour--and Muriel Spark had plenty of it to spare, particularly when it came to the description of each member of her set. She takes no pain in painting them in broad strokes, ones that she drives home again and again.
"You did well," said Miss Brodie to the class, when Miss Mackay had gone, "not to answer the question put to you. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?"
Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame, and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a fire, ventured, "Golden."
This is a short but golden wee story, enjoyable and light on the surface but also leaving some good messages in its wake about the impressionability of the young, and why perhaps it is best not to use them for your own vicarious lifestyle goals.