The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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‘Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is such a perfect gem of a story, morally complex, harrowing, funny, and featuring the most charismatic anti-hero in Scottish literature. Plus you can read it in a day.’ Ian Rankin, Guardian

‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .’

Muriel Spark’s classic, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is a brilliantly comic novel featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in all literature.

Edinburgh, 1930, and the world is on the brink of change. Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of ‘special girls’ at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the crème de la crème, each famous for something – Monica for mathematics, Eunice for swimming, Rose for sex – who are initiated into a world of adult games and extracurricular activities they will never forget. But the price they pay is their undivided loyalty.

Miss Brodie is more than just an individual with an intense desire to control and mould her girls. Beneath the façade of this self-possessed woman lie some sinister truths, and a keen interest in fascism . . . A tour de force of contemporary Scottish literature, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is a compelling portrait of a woman’s dark quest for immortality.

‘There is no question about the quality and distinctiveness of her writing, with its quirky concern with human nature, and its comedy’ William Boyd

‘Muriel Spark’s novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards’ John Updike

Spark, Muriel

Divine Spark

Emma Hogan on Muriel Spark, Memento Mori; Curriculum Vitae

I first came across Spark when working in a little second-hand bookshop off the Charing Cross Road. A battered tome of her selected works was on sale in the outside pile, desolately stationed there...

The Crème de la Crème

Christopher Rush on Murial Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark’s most famous novel was published in 1961. It is set in 1930s Edinburgh, and the characters include schoolgirls at Marcia Blaine’s High School for Girls, the dull headmistress Miss...