The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (16 page)

“You, Sandy, as you see, I exempt from suspicion, since you had no reason whatsoever to betray me, indeed you have had the best part of me in my confidences and in the man I love. Think, if you can, who it could have been. I must know which one of you betrayed me …”

Sandy replied like an enigmatic Pope: “If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayed does not apply ...”

She heard again from Miss Brodie at the time of Mary Macgregor’s death, when the girl ran hither and thither in the hotel fire and was trapped by it. “If this is a judgment on poor Mary for betraying me, I am sure I would not have wished ...”

“I’m afraid,” Jenny wrote, “Miss Brodie is past her prime. She keeps wanting to know who betrayed her. It isn’t at all like the old Miss Brodie, she was always so full of fight.”

Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone. It was always in summer time that the Brodie set came to visit Sandy, for the nunnery was deep in the country.

When Jenny came to see Sandy, who now bore the name Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, she told Sandy about her sudden falling in love with a man in Rome and there being nothing to be done about it. “Miss Brodie would have liked to know about it,” she said, “sinner as she was.”

“Oh, she was quite an innocent in her way,” said Sandy, clutching the bars of the grille.

Eunice, when she came, told Sandy, “We were at the Edinburgh Festival last year. I found Miss Brodie’s grave, I put some flowers on it. I’ve told my husband all the stories about her, sitting under the elm and all that; he thinks she was marvellous fun.”

“So she was, really, when you think of it.”

“Yes, she was,” said Eunice, “when she was in her prime.”

Monica came again. “Before she died,” she said, “Miss Brodie thought it was you who betrayed her.”

“It’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due,” said Sandy.

“Well, wasn’t it due to Miss Brodie?”

“Only up to a point,” said Sandy.

And there was that day when the enquiring young man came to see Sandy because of her strange book of psychology, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever.

“What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?”

Sandy said: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

Dame Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was an acclaimed Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose rhythmic prose and penchant for dark comedy made her one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive writers.

Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her engineer father, Bernard, was Scottish, while her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Maud, was English family. Their mixed-faith background would fuel many of the moral concerns of Spark’s later novels. Spark was raised in Edinburgh and from an early age attended James Gillespie’s High School. There her education was closely guided by an idiosyncratic teacher named Christina Kay, the inspiration for the title character in her best-known novel,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

After school, Spark worked as a department store secretary, taught English, and took college courses before meeting Sydney Oswald Spark, whom she married in 1937. Sydney Spark had a teaching job in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Spark followed him there to get married in 1937. In 1938 she gave birth to a son, Robin. However, Sydney suffered from mental illness and was physically and verbally abusive. Spark left her husband, taking her son and his nanny with her in 1940, but because of World War II’s travel restrictions, she was unable to return to Britain until 1944.

Once arrived, she settled in London, where she worked for the Foreign Office; after the war, she took on a series of writing and editing jobs, mostly for literary and trade magazines. She was the editor of
Poetry Review
for a few contentious years, until her insistence on searching out unknown poets and paying them for their work caused discord. It was while editing a collection of letters by Cardinal Newman that Spark began to explore Catholicism, eventually joining the Roman Catholic Church in 1954.

After nearly collapsing under the pressures of poverty, loneliness, and an addiction to Dexedrine, Spark sought help for her drug use and began to work seriously on a first novel,
The Comforters
(1957), partly with the financial and emotional support of the novelist Graham Greene. Though a late fiction writer, Spark began producing novels and stories at a rapid pace. In 1961 she wrote
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, widely considered her masterpiece. The novel follows a teacher at a girls’ school who carefully and manipulatively cultivates the minds and morals of a select handful of promising pupils. In 1969, it was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film starring Maggie Smith and was a Royal Command Performance.

Many of Spark’s novels were brisk, black comedies with vivid characters and subtle moral underpinnings, partly influenced by Spark’s interest in religion.
The Mandelbaum Gate
(1965), for instance, is set in Jerusalem during the Adolph Eichmann trials, which she covered for the observer newspaper.
The Only Problem
(1984) draws from the Book of Job, while
The Takeover
(1976) skewers shallow religious conviction. Aside from questions of faith, novels such as
Territorial Rights
(1979) and
Reality and Dreams
(1996) center on protagonists that search for a moral center.

Spark lived for a time in New York City, where she was given an office at the
New Yorker
. The city was the setting for her novel
The Hothouse by the East River
(1973). She lived in Rome for many years writing short and more experimental novels until she moved to Tuscany, where she would live for the final thirty years of her life with her assistant and friend, the painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Spark regularly published throughout these decades, garnering many honorary degrees and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993, a Commandeur des Artes et des Lettres in 1996, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978. She died in Tuscany in 2006.

Spark as a child. She began attending James Gillespie's High School for Girls at the age of five.

A 1930 school photograph of the junior class of James Gillespie’s High School for Girls. Spark is seated in the middle row, second from the right. Also pictured, in the middle, is the teacher who was the inspiration for Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Christina Kay.

A 1932 newspaper clipping of Spark being crowned the “Queen of Poetry” for winning first prize in a poetry competition. She was crowned by Esther Ralston, a popular silent film actress of the day.

Pages from Spark’s notebook from her science class in 1932. Her sketch of a siphon barometer is prominently featured.

Spark with her son, Robin, before she returned to Britain from Africa in 1944.

A London identity card of Spark’s from 1945–1950. The card indicates how many times Spark changed residences during the period following the war.