The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test. Some assisted in the Scottish Nationalist Movement; others, like Miss Brodie, called themselves Europeans and Edinburgh a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell.
    They were not, however, committee women. They were not school-teachers. The committee spinsters were less enterprising and not at all rebellious, they were sober churchgoers and quiet workers. The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.
    But those of Miss Brodie’s kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.
    “I tell you this, Mr. Geddes, birth control is the only answer to the problem of the working class. A free issue to every household ...”
    And often in the thriving grocers’ shops at three in the afternoon:
    “Mr. Logan, Elder though you are, I am a woman in my prime of life, so you can take it from me that you get a sight more religion out of Professor Tovey’s Sunday concerts than you do out of your kirk services.”
    And so, seen in this light, there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her. Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty. There was nothing Miss Brodie could not yet learn, she boasted of it. And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, “These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting by my prime,” but one whose nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were under formation. It extended, this prime of Miss Brodie’s, still in the making when the girls were well on in their teens. And the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.
    The summer holidays of nineteen-thirty-one marked the first anniversary of the launching of Miss Brodie’s prime. The year to come was in many ways the most sexual year of the Brodie set, who were not turned eleven and twelve; it was a crowded year of stirring revelations. In later years, sex was only one of the things in life. That year it was everything.
    The term opened vigorously as usual. Miss Brodie stood bronzed before her class and said, “I have spent most of my summer holidays in Italy once more, and a week in London, and I have brought back a great many pictures which we can pin on the wall. Here is a Cimabue. Here is a larger formation of Mussolini’s fascisti, it is a better view of them than that of last year’s picture. They are doing splendid things as I shall tell you later. I went with my friends for an audience with the Pope. My friends kissed his ring but I thought it proper only to bend over it. I wore a long black gown with a lace mantilla, and looked magnificent. In London my friends who are well-to-do—their small girl has two nurses, or nannies as they say in England—took me to visit A. A. Milne. In the hall was hung a reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera which means The Birth of Spring. I wore my silk dress with the large red poppies which is just right for my colouring. Mussolini is one of the greatest men in the world, far more so than Ramsay MacDonald, and his fascisti—”
    “Good morning, Miss Brodie. Good morning, sit down, girls,” said the headmistress who had entered in a hurry, leaving the door wide open.
    Miss Brodie passed behind her with her head up, up, and shut the door with the utmost meaning.
    “I have only just looked in,” said Miss Mackay, “and I have to be off. Well,