The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“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.