Muriel Spark

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark's unassuming story of a teacher and her students during the interwar years, is a thing of beauty: it's novella that works perfectly. 

I should say at the start that Spark was a superb writer, and in Jean Brodie her prose glistens: here is a book marked by its clarity and patience, and by its ability to weave time and place. Jean Brodie is a story in many parts, told from variety of perspectives. And yet, the book comes together: this is a tapestry of sorts, revealed with tremendous poise.

What I most enjoyed about Jean Brodie, though, was its subtle darkness: this may be a novel about a teacher and her students, but that relationship is quietly fraught. There is a disquieting quality to the dynamic which emerges over time, and which reaches its crescendo in the form of a perverse sexuality, and political conservatism, exhibited by Miss Brodie herself. 

There are also questions here about loyalty and allegiance, and about how young adults come to break the bonds which once tied them to their teachers. Spark implies that this loyalty is a thing of great beauty, but that it is also something marked by fragility. When Jean Brodie is betrayed by "her set," she casts herself as a tragic figure. Perhaps, in a way, this is true. But that tragedy took root at the start of the novel, when Brodie proposed to share the same emotional space as her students. 

Nothing good could come of this, and nothing ultimately did.