Jean Brodie

Mm-hmm

... um, who temporary, temporarily occupy the maternal role, um, they're sort of, you know, like, not that any of them were like her, but you know, like, m- Miss Jean Brodie, you know, this idea of, like, what an exceptional female life might look like.

Um-

Mm

Yeah.

Where Vivien Leigh, to me, always seemed like the teacher who, like a Miss Jean Brodie, who was always a little out there-

Yes

... because she wanted magic.

Just to finish, Fergus, just briefly, this time last year, we marked the reopening of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow after its glorious and rather expensive refurbishment by reviewing Small Acts of Love, Francis Poet's tribute to the people who lived through Lockerbie.

The theatre will soon be hosting the new production of the Prime Minister, Miss Jean Brodie, from the National Theatre Association.

Do you think the new sets, the re-open sets, is it reinvigorating the theatre scene? Oh, 100%.

I mean, the

Welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.

I'm James Wood, and this month we're discussing Muriel Spark's brilliant, beautiful, compact novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961.

In all sorts of ways, it's a perfect book for our series.

It's also very personal.

And in the most basic sense, in the most basic realist sense, it offers a recognizable and veridical account of the world.

This is, as everyone acknowledges, Muriel Spark's autobiographical novel, um, about her own schooling in 1930s Edinburgh, and about an, a teacher who was, who was very important to her and her friends.

But it's weirdly close to the novel that I was just discussing a month ago with Patricia Lockwood, uh, Nabokov's Pnin, and not just because the whole of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published in The New Yorker, as were several chapters of Pnin.

It has a very interesting interrupted, uh, form.

I don't trust so many of these people who are around.

And I was perfectly comfortable to get up because actually you get a degree of immunity when you're my age and I can come all Miss Jean Brodie over them and tell them to just sling their hook.

But to watch that happening, to watch her overriding her very clear understanding that this was going to happen, this is the sort of thing that happens when a young woman has a taxi driver, an Uber driver who turns up and the minute she sees his face when he puts the window down, she thinks, I don't want to get in the car with you And she does anyway and she goes into, she overrides her knowledge.

She doesn't want to be difficult.