I don’t think I have ever read any Muriel Spark before, but put her on my list after reading 568.
Quite a strange book; Jean Brodie’s ‘prime’ exists mainly in her own mind, and the book is narrated mainly by one of her suite of impressed followers.
Very hard to work out where the author’s sympathies lie – Jean Brodie is a radical libertarian in the prim context of 1930’s Edinburgh, but she is also quite self obsessed, possibly a procuress of younger female flesh and a fascist (in the sense of admiring the order Mussolini, in particular, brings to society).
She is eventually betrayed by her follower Sandy, who ends up as a nun not for encouraging lax permissiveness but for being a fascist, which results in her sacking from the school.
Complex enough thematically to re-read.
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