2. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," by Muriel Spark (1961)

When I told people this week I was reading Muriel Spark's famous story, most of them replied that they remembered the movie, notably Maggie Smith's iconic, Oscar-winning performance. It's not hard to see a younger, more conniving Professor McGonagall in this role, that of a spinster-ish teacher of a cult of six girls, trying to mold them into her image until one of them betrays her.

I had a hard time getting into this book. The prose is drier-than-dry and (deliberately) repetitive, and, let's be honest: in the nearly 50 years since this book's publication, how many off-the-wall teachers with unorthodox methods have we been exposed to? Then I read this paragraph:

It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favourites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls' education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie's special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. "It is for the sake of you girls -- my influence, now, in the years of my prime." This was the beginning of the Brodie set. (p.39)

I think up to this point I was happy to play along with the idea that Miss Brodie was just a loopy, self-absorbed, and altogether lonely woman -- but ultimately harmless. But with that excerpt, the novel takes a much darker turn: what she really wants is a cult of sycophants, little versions of herself. And to what end? This is a woman who possesses only a facile understanding of fascism -- she sees the low unemployment and clean streets of Mussolini's Italy but pays no mind to the tyranny behind them -- and likely enjoys that same feeling of power with her girls. What is fueling her Messianic complex?

What's interesting about the novel is that even though she's unquestionably the focal character, Jean Brodie remains an enigma. We know her only through her actions and her memorable turns of phrase ("For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like" being my favorite). The novel truly belongs to her cadre of girls, and in the second half, almost exclusively to the girl who betrays her.

All of which is to say is that the story is nothing if not an unsettling mystery. Don't be surprised if you read it, begin something else, but still find your thoughts creeping back. It's a grower.