Muriel Spark
1. "By reducing Miss Brodie to nothing more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie's pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home, alone, with Miss Brodie. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don't witness it, and the nasty suspicion arises that perhaps to talk so much about one's prime is by definition to be in it no longer." - James Wood
Do Miss Brodie's progressive principles and method reflect a realistic vision for her girls and their futures, or is the education she gives them mostly self-justification? Does she really want them to achieve great things and thereby, perhaps, miss out on the more common-place happiness of family life?
2. Why is Miss Brodie's love-life thwarted? Recalling Miss Brodie's story of her ancestor, Willie Brodie, does Miss Brodie die cheerfully on a gibbet of her own devising?
3. "Her disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics. In some ways, her attitude was a strange one, because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit, it might even have normalised her." Does this comment reflect Spark's own decision to become a Catholic?
4. Why does Sandy "betray" Miss Brodie? "If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayal does not apply ..."
5. Sandy says, "She thinks she is Providence ... she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end". Does Miss Brodie assume godlike prerogatives?
6. Why is Sandy always described as having small eyes?
7. Is the author's terse style off-putting?
Of Interest:
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969, starring Maggie Smith (pictured above)
