Cover of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie A Novel

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie A Novel

by Muriel Spark

3.6
(62 ratings)
140 pages2012Open Road MediaISBN 9781453245033

About this book

"A perfect book"—the film version won Maggie Smith an Academy award—about a controversial teacher and her female students in the years before World War II ( Chicago Tribune). "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 proves a gift to some and a curse to others. "Muriel Spark is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine." —John Updike, The New Yorker "Surprises are systematically reduced until there is only one left, and it is like the stab of a stiletto." — The Spectator "Beautifully constructed, extremely amusing, and deeply serious." — Saturday Review This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Publication Details

Publisher
Open Road Media
Published
2012
Pages
140
ISBN
9781453245033
Language
en

About Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. These included a Doctor of the University degree from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995; a Doctor of Humane Letters from the American University of Paris in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

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