I WAS torn about whether to make this week’s Icon the fictional character, Miss Jean Brodie, or her creator, Muriel Spark. I’m not sure, as is sometimes the case with authors, if the former is better known than the latter.

Then, having made my choice, I’d a moment of panic: the character was a fascist sympathiser. Like most word-workers (similar to “sex-work” but more sordid) these days, I live in terror of readers. What if they disapproved?

But how could they? Miss Brodie is a giant of literature. She is popular – in a particular way. She’s one of the few main characters of fascist inclination with whom we’re tempted to sympathise, if only up to a point.

Her inclination, to continue the excuses, was largely cultural, based on an idealistic view of Italy as civilisation and on what Orwell called “displaced nationalism”, identification with another country, as many people at that time (and much later) did with Russia. It’s almost charmingly mistaken, though we know the cost of such misty-eyed error.

Perhaps, like many intellectuals, she was not to know. I’m running ahead of myself, even if giving early hints that this week’s Icon is complex. As for her creator, undoubtedly I’ll provide an equally piquant or scatty assessment of her another time.

Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Jean Brodie was first published in 1961. It’s themes are innocence, love, loyalty, betrayal, conformity, ideals, illusions, group dynamics, emotion, rationalism, even didacticism (fascinating subject; most teachers, indeed Earthlings, lack the urge).

Its eponymous character is iconoclastic, eccentric, enigmatic, egocentric. She’s a flawed advocate of perfection, a dogmatic non-conformist, a romantic who gets love wrong. A teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in douce 1930s Edinburgh, she believes herself in her prime, that period when youth’s follies have departed and dotage lies years hence. She’s at the peak of her power, ability and wisdom, the first two arguable, the third self-deception.

She brings her personal life into the classroom, telling the girls of her lover, Hugh, standard-bearer for all men, who died in World War One just before the Armistice. She preaches about Mussolini but, on the plus side, wants her pupils to be the best, to be passionate and ambitious, to eschew the humdrum: “Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first.” They don’t, of course. The cultivation of food comes first. All else follows. But let it pass.

Spark based the character on Christina Kay, a teacher at James Gillespie's School for Girls, Edinburgh, who filled her classroom with “personal drama and poetry”, and posters of Renaissance paintings and, er, Mussolini.

Brodie, like Kay, would never even get a start in teaching today, so disrespectful is she of the curriculum. Instead, she wants to mould the girls into her vision, echoing yon Aristotle as she proclaims: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."

In search of the crème de la crème (something about cream, I think), she selects six girls as an elite group, “the Brodie set”, taking them to the theatre, art galleries and her home, making them feel special, though later one will betray her.

Indeed, there’s a sense of doom in the novel almost from the start, due to the frequent deployment of flashes forward in time – “coldly prophetic passages” in one critic’s words – so that we know (spoiler alert, though I assume most of you have been spoiled by the story already) that she is already dead at the time of narration and that, in her career – her vocation – she will be betrayed .

It was her fascism that did for her. Though first encountered aged 10, by the time the girls were 17 they were going their separate ways. Sandy, the one of the six whom she’d adopted as special confidante, comes to resent Miss Brodie’s shaping of their lives through her idea of a Calvinistic-style elect.

The school’s conservative headmistress, Emmeline Mackay, has long wanted rid of Miss Brodie, suggesting she’d be better suited to a “progressive” – or “crank” as Jean esteems them – school. So, when Sandy suggests the headmistress should accuse Brodie of encouraging fascism, Miss Mackay acts on the idea and, in the political climate of the day, that was that for Miss Brodie.

I should add that, by this time, all sorts of romantic manoeuvring had come into play, though it’s above my pay grade to go into detail. Early in the novel, Jean is described as “in many ways … an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye” though, like most of these, there’s more to her than meets the trousers. The book’s title itself tells us that part of Brodie’s interest lies in her being single as well as singular.

As for the aforementioned Sandy, as you would expect, she becomes a nun, Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, and author of a book about spiritual psychology. A young man interested in that tome visits her at her convent and asks about her influences. It’s a poignant moment. She answers: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."

Miss Brodie lived long in the memories of her students, as she does in ours. Our image of her may stem from adaptations of the novel, such as that for the film of 1969 starring Maggie Smith or the STV series of 1978 with Geraldine McEwan.

James Wood, author of How Fiction Works, has suggested that, despite being one of Britain’s best loved characters, we remember Miss Jean Brodie more for her aphorisms. “We know her just as her young pupils knew her: as a collection of tags, a rhetorical performance, a teacher's show,” he writes. “By reducing Miss Brodie to no more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie's pupils.”

If that is so then let us remember the valuable lessons she taught us, even if inadvertently. (1) Avoid cliques. (2) You’re probably not as special as you think you are. (3) Avoid people in politics with trousers tucked into tall boots.

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