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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
This oft-praised Scottish classic has been on my TBR for ages (and is short enough I could finish it in an afternoon should I make up my mind to do so!) Set in 1930s Edinburgh, the story centers on a nonconformist school teacher who is dismissed after she is betrayed by one of her students. The Guardian calls this "a sublime miracle of wit and brevity," and ranks it #79 on their all-time list of best novels.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II
“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving.
