"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Spark

A progressive spinster in 1930s Edinburgh is a teacher who has picked out six junior girls for special attention. She takes them to the opera, has them over for tea and cakes, etc. She wants to train them up for their lives ahead. She continues to see them after they leave her class (when they're 12). She admires individualism, the arts over the sciences, strong men like Hitler. She fancies the married art teacher but spends nights with the single music teacher. Time switches back and forwards for a paragraph or 2 at a time - back to when the girls were 10; forwards to when one of them, married, visits her grave, etc. The girls talk about her, wondering if she's having an affair with another teacher. Sandy, one of her girls, fantasises about talking to heros in romantic novels or Pavlova. She helps write a series of imagined love letters that Brodie might have written to a teacher. She meets Brodie years later in a hotel, describing her as "that obnoxious woman". After having become Brodie's trusted confidante (she doesn't seem to have any friends) Sandy became a psychologist then a nun. We learn about Jean Brodie mostly through what she says to the girls. Her female colleagues don't like her. The head plots to get rid of her, trying to get evidence from Brodie's chosen ones. The art teacher invites them all round, gets 2 of them to model for him, sleeps with Sandy, who thinks that the portraits he does of them all look like Brodie. One of her set betrays her so that she has to retire early. She never finds out who it was, though we know before the novel's half over

There's repetition (we're frequently reminded that Sandy has small eyes, that the music teacher has short legs, etc), though generally the different context brings out different meanings. There's much dramatic irony - we know things that characters don't know. It's fast and funny - much funnier than "Lucky Jim" for example.

Other reviews

• Alan Taylor (It is at once traditional and experimental. Rich in period detail, it is nevertheless as spare and taut as one of Simenon’s thrillers and as light as a soufflé. It is the dialogue in particular that makes it sing [] It took her little more than four weeks to compose its forty thousand and so words. [] Miss Brodie – ‘an Edinburgh Festival all on her own’ – is the personification of irony. Everything she says and does can be read from an alternative point of view. [] her school mate Frances Niven said that ‘75%’ of Miss Brodie was surely Miss Christina Kay, the teacher both of them had at Gillespie’s. Hers, noted Niven, were the expression ‘crème de la crème’ and the extra lessons on art and music. ‘She it was who took us both (who were especial favourites of hers –? – part of the as yet unborn Brodie Set) to see Pavlova’s last performance at the Empire Theatre. Who took us for afternoon tea at McVitie’s.’ [] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was first published in the United States where it had previously appeared almost in its entirety in a single issue of the New Yorker. [] reviews of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie were mixed. Some reviewers expressed bafflement while others had trouble fathoming what the novel was ‘about’. At least one critic felt that Spark had written too many books too quickly