The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is so short that it was first published, in its entirety, in the New Yorker, and then reissued in volume form by Macmillan in the UK in 1961. It was in such a volume that she began to write about a middle-aged schoolteacher, drawn from her own school memories. She composed her fiction in a copperplate hand, usually a single draft with very few corrections, in spiral-bound school notebooks from the Edinburgh stationer and bookseller James Thin. Spark’s method of composition became quite famous. Her novels followed soon after by the late 1950s, she was fully established as a writer to watch. But it was as a short-story writer that she first came to prominence at the very end of 1951, when she won the Observer short story competition for her surreal and, in places, richly poetic “The Seraph and the Zambesi”. As a young woman, she had made her way as a poet, literary editor and literary biographer in postwar London. Muriel Spark occupies a special place in the Observer’s literary history. The trailer for the film adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

That, of course, has nothing to do with school, and everything to do with sex, and the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd, with whom Miss Brodie (defiantly in her “prime”) is hopelessly in love. The age of chivalry is dead.” The novel’s theme, deftly laid out in a narrative that flashes backwards and forwards, to and from the 1930s, is the education of six wonderfully distinctive, heartless and romantic 10-year-old girls (Monica, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, and Eunice) and the covert classroom drama that leads to Miss Brodie’s “betrayal”, her peremptory dismissal from Marcia Blaine by her great enemy, the headmistress, Miss Mackay. It is, as Miss Brodie says, “nineteen-thirty-six. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age,” she boasts, “and she is mine for life.” Eventually that prediction will be fulfilled in the saddest way imaginable. At first, her ideas about beauty and goodness, her mysterious glamour and charm will dazzle and seduce her girls – “the crème de la crème” – at the Marcia Blaine School, but in the end the same gifts will cause her downfall. The action centres on the romantic, fascinating, comic and ultimately tragic schoolmistress Jean Brodie who will, in the most archetypal sense, suffer for the sin of hubris, her excessive self-confidence. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is probably the shortest novel on this list, a sublime miracle of wit and brevity, and a Scots classic that’s a masterclass in narrative construction and the art of “less is more”.

The crime of miss jean brodie