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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By MURIEL SPARK | October 6, 1961

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The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

The girls could not take off their panama hats, because this was just beyond the school gates and hatlessness was an offense.

Certain departures from the proper set of the hat on the head were overlooked in the case of fourth-form girls and upward, so long as nobody wore her hat at an angle.

But there were other, subtle variants from the ordinary rule of wearing the brim turned up at the back and down at the front, and the five girls, standing very close to each other because of the boys, wore their hats each with a definite difference.

These girls formed the Brodie set.

That was what they had been called even before the headmistress had given them the name, in scorn, when they had moved from the Junior to the Senior School, at the age of twelve.

At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school.

These girls were discovered to have heard of the Buchmanites and Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages to the skin of cleansing cream and witch hazel over honest soap and water, and the word “menarche.”

The interior decoration of the London house of the author of “Winnie the Pooh” had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Brontë and of Miss Brodie herself.

They were aware of the existence of Einstein, and the arguments of those who consider the Bible to be untrue.

They knew the rudiments of astrology, but not the date of the Battle of Flodden or the capital of Finland.

All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results more or less.

By the time they were sixteen and had reached the fourth form, and had adapted themselves to the orthodox regime, they remained unmistakably Brodie, and were all famous in the school—which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking.

They had no team spirit and very little in common with each other outside their continuing friendship with Jean Brodie.

She still taught in the Junior department.

She was held in great suspicion.

Marcia Blaine School for Girls was a day school in Edinburgh, which had been partially endowed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the wealthy widow of an Edinburgh bookbinder.

She had been an admirer of Garibaldi.

Her manly portrait hung in the great hall, and was honored every Founder’s Day by a bunch of hard-wearing flowers, such as chrysanthemums or dahlias.

These were placed in a vase beneath the portrait, upon a lectern, which also held an open Bible with the text underlined in red ink, “O where shall I find a virtuous woman, for her price is above rubies.”

The girls who loitered beneath a tree, shoulder to shoulder because of the boys, were all famous for something.

Monica Douglas was a prefect, famous mostly for mathematics, which she could do in her brain, and for her anger, which, when it was lively enough, drove her to slap out to right and left.

She had a very red nose, winter and summer, long dark plaits, and fat, peglike legs.

Since she had turned sixteen, Monica Wore her panama hat rather higher on her head than normal, perched as if it were too small and as if she knew she looked grotesque in any case.

Rose Stanley was famous for sex.

Her hat was placed quite unobtrusively on her blond short hair, but she dented in the crown on either side.

Eunice Gardiner, small, neat, and famous for her sprightly gymnastics and glamorous swimming, had the brim of her hat turned up at the front and down at the back.

Sandy Stranger wore hers turned up all around and as far back on her head as it could possibly go; to assist this, she had attached to her hat a strip of elastic, which went under the chin.

Sometimes Sandy chewed this elastic, and when it was chewed down she sewed on a new piece.

She was merely notorious for her small, almost nonexistent eyes, but she was famous for her vowel sounds, which, long ago in the Junior School, had enraptured Miss Brodie.

“Well, come and recite for us, please, because it has been a tiring day.” Sandy would recite:

“She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot.”

“It lifts one up,” Miss Brodie usually said, passing her hand outward from her breast toward the class of ten-year-old girls, who were listening for the bell that would release them. “

‘Where there is no vision,’ ” Miss Brodie had assured them, “ ‘the people perish.’

Eunice, come and do a somersault, in order that we may have comic relief.”

Jenny Gray wore her hat with the front brim bent sharply downward; she was the prettiest and most graceful girl of the set, and this was her fame.

Now the boys with their bicycles were cheerfully insulting her about her way of speech, which she had got from her elocution classes.

She was going to be an actress.

She was Sandy’s best friend.

“Don’t be a lout, Andrew,” she said with her uppish tone.

There were three Andrews among the five boys, and these three Andrews now started mimicking Jenny—“‘Don’t be a lout, Andrew’ ”—while the girls laughed beneath their bobbing panamas.

Along came Mary Macgregor, the last member of the set, whose fame rested on her being a silent lump, a nobody whom everybody could blame.

Her hat was outstandingly normal.

With Mary was an outsider, Joyce Emily Hammond, the very rich girl who had been recently sent to Blaine as a last hope, because no other school, no governess could manage her.

She still wore the green uniform of her old school.

The others wore deep violet.

She insisted on the use of her two names—Joyce Emily.

She was trying very hard to get into the famous set and thought the two names might establish her as a something, but there was no chance of it and she could not see why.

Joyce Emily said, “There’s a teacher coming out,” and nodded toward the gates.

Two of the Andrews wheeled their bicycles out onto the road and departed.

The other three boys remained defiantly, but looking the other way, as if they might have stopped to admire the clouds on the Pentland Hills.

The girls crowded round each other as if in discussion.

“Good afternoon,” said Miss Brodie when she approached the group. “I haven’t seen you for some days. I think we won’t detain these young men and their bicycles. Good afternoon, boys.”

The famous set moved off with her, and Joyce Emily followed.

“I think I haven’t met this new girl,” said Miss Brodie, looking closely at Joyce. And when they were introduced, she said, “Well, we must be on our way, my dear.”

Sandy looked back as Joyce Emily walked, and then skipped, leggy and uncontrolled for her age, in the opposite direction, and the Brodie set was left to its secret life, as it had been six years ago, in childhood. “I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,” Miss Brodie had told them at that time, “and all my pupils are the crème de la crème.” Sandy looked with her little screwed-up eyes at Monica’s very red nose and remembered this saying as she followed the set in the wake of Miss Brodie.

“I should like you girls to come to supper tomorrow night,” Miss Brodie said. “Make sure you are free.”

“The Dramatic Society,” murmured Jenny.

“Send an excuse,” said Miss Brodie. “I have to consult you about a new plot which is afoot to force me to resign. Needless to say, I shall not resign.” She spoke calmly, as she always did, in spite of her forceful words.

Miss Brodie never discussed her affairs with the other members of the staff, but only with these former pupils whom she had trained up in her confidence. There had been previous plots to remove her from Blaine, which had been foiled.

“It has been suggested again that I should apply for a post at one of the progressive schools, where my methods would be more suited to the system than they are at Blaine. But I shall not apply for a post at a crank school. I shall remain at this education factory. There needs must be a leaven in the lump. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The Brodie set smiled in understanding of various kinds.

Miss Brodie forced her brown eyes to flash as a meaningful accompaniment to her quiet voice. She looked a mighty woman, with her dark Roman profile in the sun. The Brodie set did not for a moment doubt that she would prevail. As soon expect Julius Caesar to apply for a job at a crank school as Miss Brodie. She would never resign. If the authorities wanted to get rid of her, she would have to be assassinated.

“Who are the gang this time?” asked Rose.

“We shall discuss tomorrow night the persons who oppose me,” Miss Brodie said. “But rest assured they shall not succeed.”

“No,” said everyone. “No, of course they won’t.”

“Not while I am in my prime,” she said. “These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognize the years of one’s prime, always remember that. Here is my tramcar. I daresay I’ll not get a seat. This is 1936. The age of chivalry is past.”

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors, they passed the headmistress’s study. The door was wide open, the room empty. “Little girls,” said Miss Brodie, “come and observe this.”

They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man’s big face. Underneath were the words “Safety First.”

“This is Stanley Baldwin, who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,” said Miss Brodie. “Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan ‘Safety First.’ But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first. Follow me.”

This was the first intimation to the girls of an odds between Miss Brodie and the rest of the teaching staff. Indeed, to some of them it was the first intimation that it was possible for people glued together in grown-up authority to differ at all. Taking inward note of this, and with the exhilarating feeling of being in on the faint smell of a row without being endangered by it, they followed dangerous Miss Brodie into the secure shade of the elm.

Often that sunny autumn, when the weather permitted, the small girls took their lessons seated on three benches arranged about the elm. “Hold up your books,” said Miss Brodie quite often. “Prop them up in your hands, in case of intruders. If there are any intruders, we are doing our history lesson.” Or it might be “our poetry,” or “English grammar.”

The small girls held up their books, with their eyes not on them but on Miss Brodie.

“Meantime, I will tell you about my last summer holiday in Egypt.” . . . “I will tell you about the Frenchman I met in the train to Biarritz.” . . . “I must tell you about the Italian paintings I saw. Who is the greatest Italian painter?”

“Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.”

“That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto; he is my favorite.”

Some days, it seemed to Sandy that Miss Brodie’s chest was flat, no bulges at all but straight as her back. On other days her chest was breast-shaped and large, very noticeable, something for Sandy to sit and peer at through her tiny eyes while Miss Brodie, on a day of lessons indoors, stood erect, with her brown head held high, staring out of the window like Joan of Arc as she spoke.

“I have frequently told you, and the holidays just past have convinced me, that my prime has truly begun. One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full. Mary, what have you got under your desk, what are you looking at?”

Mary sat, lumplike. She was too stupid ever to tell a lie; she didn’t know how to cover up. “A comic, Miss Brodie,” she said.

“Do you mean a comedian, a droll?”

Everyone tittered.

“A comic paper,” Mary said.

“A comic paper, forsooth. How old are you?”

“Ten, ma’am.”

“You are too old for comic papers at ten. Give it to me.”

Miss Brodie looked at the colored sheets. “Tiger Tim’s, forsooth,” she said, and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Perceiving all eyes upon it, she lifted it out of the basket, tore it up beyond redemption, and put it back again. “Attend to me, girls. One’s prime is the moment one was born for. Now that my prime has begun—Sandy, your attention is wandering. What have I been talking about?”

“Your prime, Miss Brodie.”

Later that morning, out in the garden, Miss Brodie said, “If anyone comes along in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar. Meantime, I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger than I am now, though six years older than the man himself.” She leaned against the elm.

It was one of the last autumn days, when the leaves were falling in little gusts. They fell on the children, who were thankful for this excuse to wriggle and for the allowable movements in brushing the leaves from their hair and laps.

“ ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ I was engaged to a young man at the beginning of the war, but he fell on Flanders field,” said Miss Brodie. “Are you thinking, Sandy, of doing a day’s washing?”

“No, Miss Brodie.”

“Because you have got your sleeves rolled up. I won’t have to do with girls who roll up the sleeves of their blouses, however fine the weather. Roll them down at once; we are civilized beings. He fell the week before Armistice was declared. He fell like an autumn leaf, although he was only twenty-two years of age. When we go indoors, we shall look on the map at Flanders and the spot where my lover was laid before you were born. He was poor. He came from Ayrshire—a countryman, but a hard-working and clever scholar. He said, when he asked me to marry him, ‘We shall have to drink water and walk slow.’ That was Hugh’s country way of expressing that we would live quietly. We shall drink water and walk slow. What does the saying signify, Rose?”

“That you would live quietly, Miss Brodie,” said Rose Stanley, who six years later had a great reputation for sex.

The story of Miss Brodie’s felled fiancé was well on its way when the headmistress, Miss Mackay, was seen to approach across the lawn. Tears had already started to drop from Sandy’s little piglike eyes, and Sandy’s tears now affected her friend Jenny, later famous in the school for her beauty, who gave a sob and groped up the leg of her knickers for her handkerchief. “Hugh was killed a week before the Armistice,” said Miss Brodie. “After that, there was a general election and people were saying ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ Hugh was one of the Flowers of the Forest, lying in his grave.” Rose Stanley had now begun to weep. Sandy slid her wet eyes sideways, watching the advance of Miss Mackay, head and shoulders forward, across the lawn.

“I am come to see you and I have to be off,” Miss Mackay said. “What are you little girls crying for?”

“They are moved by a story I have been telling them. We are having a history lesson,” said Miss Brodie, catching a falling leaf neatly in her hand as she spoke.

“Crying over a story at ten years of age!” said Miss Mackay to the girls, who had stragglingly risen from the benches, still dazed with Hugh the warrior. “I am only come to see you and I must be off. Well, girls, the new term has begun. I hope you all had a splendid summer holiday and I look forward to seeing your splendid essays on how you spent them. You shouldn’t be crying over history at the age of ten. My word!”

“You did well not to answer the question put to you,” said Miss Brodie to the class when Miss Mackay had gone. “It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?”

Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame, and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, “Golden.”

“What did I say was golden?”

Mary cast her eyes around her and up above.

Sandy whispered, “The falling leaves.”

“The falling leaves,” said Mary.

“Plainly,” said Miss Brodie, “you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me, I would make of you the crème de la crème.”

Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realized that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of great misery—her first and last boy friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again—she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions that had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled, and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was, sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils.

“Who has spilled ink on the floor—was it you, Mary?”

“I don’t know, Miss Brodie.”

“I daresay it was you. I’ve never come across such a clumsy girl. And if you can’t take an interest in what I am saying, please try to look as if you did.”

These were the days that Mary Macgregor, on looking back, found to be the happiest days of her life.

Sandy Stranger had a feeling at the time that they were supposed to be the happiest days of her life, and on her tenth birthday she said so to her best friend, Jenny Gray, who had been asked to tea at Sandy’s house. The specialty of the feast was pineapple cubes with cream, and the specialty of the day was that they were left to themselves. To Sandy, the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness, and she focussed her small eyes closely on the pale-gold cubes before she scooped them up in her spoon, and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares. Both girls saved the cream to the last, then ate it in spoonfuls.

“Little girls, you are going to be the crème de la crème,” said Sandy, and Jenny spluttered her cream into her handkerchief.

“You know,” Sandy said, “these are supposed to be the happiest days of our lives.”

“Yes, they are always saying that,” Jenny said.

“They say, ‘Make the most of your school days, because you never know what lies ahead of you.’ ”

“Miss Brodie says prime is best,” Sandy said.

“Yes, but she never got married, like our mothers and fathers.”

“They don’t have primes,” said Sandy.

“They have sexual intercourse,” Jenny said.

The little girls paused, because this was still a stupendous thought, and one that they had only lately lit upon; the very phrase and its meaning were new. It was quite unbelievable. Sandy said then, “Mr. Lloyd had a baby last week. He must have committed sex with his wife.” This idea was easier to cope with, and they laughed screamingly into their pink paper napkins. Mr. Lloyd was the art master to the Senior girls, a man of legendary cast, who had lost one arm in the Great War.

“Can you see it happening?” Jenny whispered.

Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind. “He would be wearing his pajamas,” she whispered back.

The girls rocked with mirth, thinking of one-armed Mr. Lloyd, in his solemnity, striding into school. Then Jenny said, “You do it on the spur of the moment. That’s how it happens.” Jenny was a reliable source of information, because a girl employed by her father in his grocery shop had recently been found to be pregnant, and Jenny had picked up some fragments of the ensuing fuss. Having confided her finds to Sandy, they had embarked on a course of research, which they called “research,” piecing together clues from remembered conversations illicitly overheard, and passages from the big dictionaries. “It all happens in a flash,” Jenny said. “It happened to Teenie when she was out walking at Puddocky with her boy friend. Then they had to get married.”

“You would think the urge would have passed by the time she got her clothes off,” Sandy said. “Clothes” seemed the polite word in this scientific context.

“Yes, that’s what I can’t understand,” said Jenny.

Sandy’s mother looked round the door and said, “Enjoying yourselves, darlings?” Over her shoulder appeared the head of Jenny’s mother. “My word,” said Jenny’s mother, looking at the tea table, “they’ve been tucking in!”

Sandy felt offended and belittled by this; it was as if the main idea of the party had been the food.

“What would you like to do now?” Sandy’s mother asked.

Sandy gave her mother a look of secret ferocity, which meant: You promised to leave us all on our own, and a promise is a promise, you know it’s very bad to break a promise to a child, you might ruin all my life by breaking your promise, it’s my birthday.

Sandy’s mother backed away, bearing Jenny’s mother with her. “Let’s leave them to themselves,” she said. “Just enjoy yourselves, darlings.”

Sandy was sometimes embarrassed by her mother’s being English and calling her “darling”—not like the mothers of Edinburgh, who said “dear.” Sandy’s mother had a flashy winter coat trimmed with fluffy fox fur like the Duchess of York’s, while the other mothers wore tweed, or, at the most, muskrat that would do them all their days.

It had been raining, and the ground was too wet for the girls to go and finish digging the hole they had started to Australia, so they lifted the tea table with its festal relics over to the corner of the room. Sandy opened the lid of the piano stool and extracted a notebook from between two sheaves of music. On the first page of the notebook was writtenTHE MOUNTAIN EYRIE by SANDY STRANGER AND JENNY GRAY

This was a story, still in the process of composition, about Miss Brodie’s lover Hugh Carruthers. He had not been killed in the war—that was a mistake in the telegram. He had come back from the war and called to inquire for Miss Brodie at the school, where the first person whom he encountered was Miss Mackay, the headmistress. She had informed him that Miss Brodie did not desire to see him; she loved another. With a bitter, harsh laugh, Hugh went and made his abode in a mountain eyrie, where, wrapped in a leathern jacket, he had been discovered one day by Sandy and Jenny. At the present stage in the story, Hugh was holding Sandy captive but Jenny had escaped by night and was attempting to find her way down the mountainside in the dark. Hugh was preparing to pursue her.

Sandy took a pencil from a drawer in the sideboard and continued:“Hugh!” Sandy beseeched him, “I swear to you before all I hold sacred that Miss Brodie has never loved another, and she awaits you below, praying and hoping in her prime. If you will let Jenny go, she will bring back your lover Jean Brodie to you and you will see her with your own eyes and hold her in your arms after these twelve long years and a day.” His black eye flashed in the lamplight of the hut. “Back, girl!” he cried, “and do not bar my way. Well do I know that yon girl Jenny will report my whereabouts to my mocking erstwhile fiancé. Well do I know that you are both spies sent by her that she might mock. Stand back from the door, I say!” “Never!” said Sandy, placing her young lithe body squarely in front of the latch and her arm through the bolt. Her large eyes flashed with an azure light of appeal.

Sandy handed the pencil to Jenny. “It’s your turn,” she said.

Jenny wrote:With one movement he flung her to the farthest end of the hut and strode out into the moonlight and his strides made light of the drifting snow.

“Put in about his boots,” said Sandy.

Jenny wrote, “His high boots flashed in the moonlight.”

“There are too many ‘moonlight’s,” Sandy said. “But we can sort that later, when it comes to publication.”

“Oh, but it’s a secret, Sandy!” said Jenny.

“I know that,” Sandy said. “Don’t worry, we won’t publish it till our prime.”

“Do you think Miss Brodie ever had sexual intercourse with Hugh?” Jenny asked.

“She would have had a baby, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think they did anything like that,” said Sandy. “Their love was above all that.”

“Miss Brodie said they clung to each other with passionate abandon on his last leave.”

“I don’t think they took their clothes off, though,” Sandy said. “Do you?”

“No. I can’t see it,” said Jenny.

“I wouldn’t like to have sexual intercourse,” Sandy said.

“Neither would I. I’m going to marry a pure person.”

“Have a toffee.”

They ate their sweets, sitting on the carpet. Sandy put some coal on the fire and the light spurted up, reflecting on Jenny’s ringlets. “Let’s be witches by the fire, like we were at Halloween.”

They sat in the twilight eating toffees and incanting witches’ spells. Jenny said, “There’s a Greek god at the museum, standing up with nothing on. I saw it last Sunday afternoon, but I was with Auntie Kate and I didn’t have a chance to look properly.”

“Let’s go to the museum next Sunday,” Sandy said. “It’s research.”

“Would you be allowed to go alone with me?”

Sandy, who was notorious for not being allowed to go out and about without a grown-up person, said, “I don’t think so. Perhaps we could get someone to take us.”

“We could ask Miss Brodie.”

Miss Brodie frequently took the little girls to the art galleries and museums, so this seemed feasible.

“But suppose,” said Sandy, “she won’t let us look at the statue if it’s naked.”

“I don’t think she would notice that it was naked,” Jenny said.

“I know,” said Sandy. “Miss Brodie’s above all that.”

It was time for Jenny to go home with her mother, all the way in the tramcar through the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh across the Dean Bridge. Sandy waved from the window, and wondered if Jenny, too, had the feeling of leading a double life, fraught with problems that even a millionaire did not have to face. It was well known that millionaires led double lives. The evening paper rattlesnaked its way through the letter box, and there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house.

Miss Brodie was reciting poetry to the class at a quarter to four, to raise their minds before they went home. Miss Brodie’s eyes were half closed and her head was thrown back.“In the stormy east wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower’d Camelot.”

Sandy watched Miss Brodie through her little pale eyes, screwed them smaller and shut her lips tight. Rose Stanley was pulling threads from the girdle of her gym tunic. Jenny was enthralled by the poem; her lips were parted—she was never bored. Sandy was never bored, but in order never to be bored she had to lead a double life of her own.

Miss Brodie recited:“Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott.”

“By what means did Your Ladyship write these words?” Sandy inquired in her mind.

“There was a pot of white paint and a brush which happened to be standing upon the grassy verge,” replied the Lady of Shalott graciously. “It was left there, no doubt, by some heedless member of the Unemployed.”

“Alas, and in all that rain!” said Sandy for want of something better to say, while Miss Brodie’s voice soared up to the ceiling and curled round the feet of the Senior girls upstairs.

The Lady of Shalott placed a white hand on Sandy’s shoulder and gazed at her for a space. “That one so young and beautiful should be so ill-fated in love!” she said in low, sad tones.

“What can be the meaning of these words?” cried Sandy in alarm, with her little eyes screwed on Miss Brodie and her lips shut tight.

Miss Brodie said, “Sandy, are you in pain?”

Sandy looked astonished.

“You girls,” said Miss Brodie, “must learn to cultivate an expression of composure. It is one of the best assets of a woman, an expression of composure, come foul, come fair. Regard the Mona Lisa over yonder!”

All heads turned to look at the reproduction that Miss Brodie had brought back from her travels and pinned on the wall. Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure, even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.

“She is older than the rocks on which she sits. Would that I had been given charge of you girls when you were seven. I sometimes fear it’s too late now. If you had been mine when you were seven, you would have been the crème de la crème. Sandy, come and read some stanzas and let us hear your vowel sounds.”

Sandy, being half English, made the most of her vowels; it was her only fame. Rose Stanley was not yet famous for sex, and it was not she but Eunice Gardiner who had approached Sandy and Jenny with a Bible, pointing out the words “The babe leapt in her womb.” Sandy and Jenny said she was dirty, and threatened to tell on her. Jenny was already famous for her prettiness and had a sweet voice, so that Mr. Lowther, who taught singing, would watch her admiringly as she sang “Come see where golden-hearted spring. . . ,” and he twitched her ringlets, the more daringly since Miss Brodie always stayed with her pupils during the singing lesson. He twitched her ringlets and looked at Miss Brodie like a child showing off its tricks, and almost as if testing Miss Brodie to see if she were at all willing to conspire in his un-Edinburgh conduct.

Mr. Lowther was small, with a long body and short legs. His hair and mustache were red gold. He curled his hand round the back of his ear and inclined his head toward each girl to test her voice. “Sing ‘ah’!”

“Ah!” sang Jenny, high and pure as the sea maiden of the Hebrides whom Sandy had been talking about. But her eyes swivelled over to catch Sandy’s.

Miss Brodie ushered the girls from the music room and, gathering them about her, said, “You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms, I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. Form a single file now, please, and walk with your heads up, up, like Sybil Thorndike, a woman of noble mien.”

Sandy craned back her head, pointed her freckled nose in the air, and fixed her little piglike eyes on the ceiling as she walked along in the file.

“What are you doing, Sandy?”

“Walking like Sybil Thorndike, ma’am.”

“One day, Sandy, you will go too far.”

Sandy looked hurt and puzzled.

“Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “I have my eye upon you, Sandy. I observe a frivolous nature. I fear you will never belong to life’s élite.”

When they had returned to the classroom, Rose Stanley said, “I’ve got ink on my blouse.”

“Go to the science room and have the stain removed, but remember it is very bad for the tussore.”

Sometimes the girls would put a little spot of ink on a sleeve of their tussore silk blouses so that they might be sent to the science room in the Senior School. There, a thrilling teacher, a Miss Lockhart, wearing a white overall, with her gray short hair set back in waves from a tanned and weathered golfer’s face, would pour a small drop of white liquid from a large jar onto a piece of cotton wool. With this she would dab the ink spot on the sleeve, silently holding the girl’s arm, intently absorbed in the task. Rose Stanley went to the science room with her inky blouse only because she was bored, but Sandy and Jenny got ink on their blouses at discreet intervals of four weeks so that they could go and have their arms held by Miss Lockhart, who seemed to carry six inches of pure air around her person wherever she moved in that strange-smelling room. This long room was her natural setting, and she had lost something of her quality when Sandy saw her walking from the school in her box-pleat tweeds over to her sports car, like an ordinary teacher. To Sandy, Miss Lockhart in the science room was something apart, surrounded by three lanes of long benches set out with jars half full of colored crystals and powders and liquids, ochre and bronze and metal gray and cobalt blue, glass vessels of curious shapes—bulbous, or with pipelike stems.

Only once when Sandy went to the science room was there a lesson in progress. The older girls, big girls, some with bulging chests, were standing in couples at the benches, with gas jets burning before them. They held glass tubes full of green stuff in their hands and were dancing the tubes in the flames—dozens of dancing green tubes and flames, all along the benches. The bare winter top branches of the trees brushed the windows of this long room, and beyond that was the cold winter sky with a huge red sun. Sandy had the presence of mind to remember that her school days were supposed to be the happiest days of her life, and she took the compelling news back to Jenny that the Senior School was going to be marvellous and Miss Lockhart was beautiful. “All the girls in the science room were doing just as they liked,” said Sandy, “and that’s what they were supposed to be doing.”

“We do a lot of what we like in Miss Brodie’s class,” Jenny said. “My mummy says Miss Brodie gives us too much freedom.”

“She’s not supposed to give us freedom, she’s supposed to give us lessons,” said Sandy. “But the science class is supposed to be free—it’s allowed.”

“Well, I like being in Miss Brodie’s,” Jenny said.

“So do I,” Sandy said. “She takes an interest in our general knowledge, my mother says.”

All the same, the visits to the science room were Sandy’s most secret joy, and she calculated very carefully the intervals between one ink spot and another, so that there should be no suspicion on Miss Brodie’s part that the spots were not accidents. Miss Lockhart would hold her arm and carefully dab the inkstain on her sleeve while Sandy stood enthralled by the long room and by the lawful glamour of everything there.

It was on the occasion when Rose Stanley, after the singing lesson, was sent to the science room to get ink off her blouse that Miss Brodie told her class, “You must be more careful with your ink. I can’t have my girls going up and down to the science room like this. We must keep our good name.” She added, “Art is greater than science. Art comes first, and then science.”

The large map had been rolled down over the blackboard, because they had started the geography lesson. Miss Brodie turned with her pointer to show where Alaska lay. But she turned again to the class and said, “Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly, science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.”

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned 1931. Miss Brodie had already selected her favorites, or rather those whom she could trust—or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls’ education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie’s special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others; they were taken into her confidence; they understood her private life and learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf. “It is for the sake of you girls—my influence now, in the years of my prime.” This was the beginning of the Brodie set.

Eunice Gardiner was so quiet at first, it was difficult to see why she had been drawn in by Miss Brodie. But eventually she cut capers for the relief and amusement of the tea parties, doing cartwheels on the carpet. “You are an Ariel,” said Miss Brodie. Then Eunice began to chatter. She was not allowed to do cartwheels on Sundays, for in many ways Miss Brodie was an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye. Eunice Gardiner did somersaults on the mat only at Saturday gatherings before high teas, or afterward on Miss Brodie’s kitchen linoleum, while the other girls were washing up and licking honey from the depleted comb off their fingers as they passed it over to be put away in the food cupboard. It was twenty-eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat that she, who had become a nurse and married a doctor, said to her husband one evening, “Next year when we go for the Festival . . .”

“Yes?”

She was making a wool rug, pulling at a stitch. “When we go to Edinburgh,” she said, “remind me while we’re there to go and visit Miss Brodie’s grave.”

“Who was Miss Brodie?”

“A teacher of mine—she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime.”

“Prime what?”

“Her prime of life. She fell for an Egyptian courier once, on her travels, and came back and told us all about it. She had a few favorites. I was one of them. I did the splits and made her laugh, you know.”

“I always knew your upbringing was a bit peculiar.”

“But she wasn’t mad. She was as sane as anything. She knew exactly what she was doing. She told us all about her love life, too.”

“Let’s have it, then.”

“Oh, it’s a long story. She was just a spinster. I must take flowers to her grave—I wonder if I could find it?”

“When did she die?”

“Just after the war. She was retired by then. She was forced to retire beforetime—it was rather a tragedy. The head never liked her. There’s a long story attached to Miss Brodie’s retirement. She was betrayed by one of her own girls—we were called the Brodie set. I never found out which one betrayed her.”

It is time now to speak of the long walk through the old parts of Edinburgh, where Miss Brodie took her set, dressed in their deep-violet coats and black velour hats with the green-and-white crest, one Friday in March when the school’s central heating system had broken down and everyone else had been muffled up and sent home. The wind blew from the icy Forth, and the sky was loaded with forthcoming snow. Mary Macgregor walked with Sandy, because Jenny had gone home. Monica Douglas, later famous for being able to do real mathematics in her head and for her anger, walked behind them, with her dark-red face, broad nose, and dark pigtails falling from her black hat, and her legs already shaped like pegs in their black wool stockings. By her side walked Rose Stanley, tall and blond, with a yellow-pale skin, who had not yet won her reputation for sex and whose conversation was all about trains, cranes, motorcars, Meccanos, and other boys’ affairs. She was also an energetic climber of walls and trees. And although these concerns at Rose Stanley’s eleventh year marked her as a tomboy, they did not go deep into her femininity, and it was her superficial knowledge of these topics alone, as if they had been a conscious preparation, that stood her in good stead a few years later with the boys. With Rose walked Miss Brodie, head up, like Sybil Thorndike, her nose arched and proud. She wore her loose brown tweed coat with the beaver collar tightly buttoned, her brown felt hat with the brim up at one side and down at the other. Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement, so that Miss Brodie, turning around, said from time to time, “Now, Eunice!” And, from time to time again, Miss Brodie would fall behind to keep Eunice company.

Sandy, who had been reading “Kidnapped,” was having a conversation with the hero, Alan Breck, and was glad to be with Mary Macgregor, because it was not necessary to talk to Mary.

“Mary, you may speak quietly to Sandy,” Miss Brodie said.

“Sandy won’t talk to me,” said Mary, who later, in that hotel fire, ran hither and thither till she died.

“Sandy cannot talk to you if you are so stupid and disagreeable. Try to wear an agreeable expression at least, Mary.”

“Sandy, you must take this message o’er the heather to the Macphersons,” said Alan Breck. “My life depends upon it, and the Cause no less.”

“I shall never fail you, Alan Breck,” said Sandy. “Never.”

“Mary,” said Miss Brodie, from behind, “please try not to lag behind Sandy.”

Sandy kept pacing ahead, fired by Alan Breck, whose ardor and thankfulness, as Sandy prepared to set off across the heather, had reached touching proportions. Mary tried to keep up with her. They were crossing the Meadows, a gusty expanse of common land, glaring green under the snowy sky. Their destination was the Old Town, for Miss Brodie had said they should see where history had been lived, and their route had brought them to the Middle Meadow Walk.

Eunice, unaccompanied at the back, began to hop to a rhyme that she repeated to herself:“Edinburgh, Leith Portobello, Musselburgh, And Dalkeith.”

Then she changed to the other foot.

Miss Brodie turned round and hushed her, then called forward to Mary Macgregor, who was staring at an Indian student coming toward them, “Mary, don’t you want to walk tidily?”

“Mary,” said Sandy, “stop staring at the brown man.”

The nagged child looked numbly at Sandy and tried to quicken her pace. But Sandy was walking unevenly, in little spurts forward and little halts, as Alan Breck began to sing to her before she took to the heather to deliver the message that was going to save his life. He sang,“This is the song of the sword of Alan. The smith made it, The fire set it; Now it shines in the hand of Alan Breck.”

Then Alan Breck clapped her shoulder and said, “Sandy, you are a brave lass and want nothing in courage that any King’s man might possess.”

“Don’t walk so fast,” Mary mumbled.

“You aren’t walking with your head up,” said Sandy. “Keep it up, up.” Then suddenly Sandy wanted to be kind to Mary Macgregor, and thought of the possibilities of feeling nice from being nice to Mary instead of blaming her.

Miss Brodie’s voice from behind was saying to Rose Stanley, “You are all heroines in the making. Britain must be a fit country for heroines to live in. The League of Nations . . .”

The sound of Miss Brodie’s presence just when it was on the tip of Sandy’s tongue to be nice to Mary Macgregor arrested the urge. Sandy looked back at her companions, and understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice, and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose. She was even more frightened then by her temptation to be nice to Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be lonely, and blamable in a more dreadful way than Mary, who, although officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie’s category of heroines in the making. So, for good fellowship’s sake, Sandy said to Mary, “I wouldn’t be walking with you if Jenny was here.”

Mary said, “I know.”

Then Sandy started to hate herself again and to nag on and on at Mary, with the feeling that if you did a thing a lot of times you made it into a right thing.

Mary started to cry, but quietly, so that Miss Brodie could not see.

Sandy was unable to cope, and decided to stride on and be a married lady having an argument with her husband: “Well, Colin, it’s rather hard on a woman when the lights have fused and there isn’t a man in the house.”

“Dearest Sandy, how was I to know . . . ?”

As they came to the end of the Meadows, a group of Girl Guides came by. Miss Brodie’s brood, all but Mary, walked past with eyes ahead. Mary stared at the dark-blue big girls, with their regimented, vigorous look and broader accents of speech than the Brodie girls used when in Miss Brodie’s presence. The Girl Guides passed, and Sandy said to Mary, “It’s rude to stare.” And Mary said, “I wasn’t staring.” Behind them, Miss Brodie was being questioned on the subject of the Brownies and the Girl Guides, for quite a lot of the other girls in the Junior School were Brownies.

“For those who like that sort of thing,” said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, “that is the sort of thing they like.”

So Brownies and Guides were ruled out. Sandy recalled Miss Brodie’s admiration for Mussolini’s marching troops, and the picture she had brought back from Italy showing the triumphant march of the black uniforms into Rome.

“These are the Fascisti,” said Miss Brodie, and spelled it out. “What are these men, Rose?”

“The Fascisti, Miss Brodie.”

They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform, like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress, and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his Fascisti, and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s Fascisti—not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need, and, in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it; there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival Fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.

“We make good company for each other, Sandy,” said Alan Breck, crunching beneath his feet the broken glass among the blood on the floor of the ship’s roundhouse. And, taking a knife from the table, he cut off one of the silver buttons from his coat. “Wherever you show that button,” he said, “the friends of Alan Breck will come around you.”

“We turn to the right,” said Miss Brodie.

They approached the Old Town, which none of the girls had properly seen before, because none of their parents were so historically minded as to be moved to conduct their young into the reeking network of slums that constituted the Old Town in those years. The Canongate, the Grassmarket, the Lawnmarket were names that betokened a misty region of crime and desperation. Only Eunice Gardiner and Monica Douglas had already traversed the High Street on foot on the Royal Mile from the Castle or Holyrood. Sandy had been taken to Holyrood in an uncle’s car and had seen the bed, too short and too broad, where Mary Queen of Scots had slept, and the tiny room, smaller than their own scullery at home, where the Queen had played cards with Rizzio.

Now they were in a great square—the Grassmarket—with the Castle rearing between a big gap in the houses where the aristocracy used to live. It was Sandy’s first experience of a foreign country, which intimates itself by its new smells and shapes and its new poor. A man sat on the icy-cold pavement; he just sat. A crowd of children, some without shoes, were playing a fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Brodie’s violet-clad company with words that the girls had not heard before but rightly understood to be obscene. Children and women with shawls came in and out of the dark closes. Sandy found she was holding Mary’s hand in her bewilderment; all the girls were holding hands, while Miss Brodie talked of history. “John Knox,” said Miss Brodie, “was an embittered man. He could never be at ease with the gay French Queen. We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.”

They turned into the High Street. The smell was amazingly terrible. In the middle of the road farther up, a crowd was gathered. “Walk past quietly,” said Miss Brodie.

The crowd had formed a ring round a man and a woman. They were shouting at each other, and the man hit the woman twice across the head. Another woman, very little, with cropped black hair, a red face, and a big mouth, came forward and took the man by the arm. She said, “I’ll be your man.”

From time to time throughout her life, Sandy pondered this, for she was certain that the little woman’s words were “I’ll be your man,” not “I’ll be your woman,” and it was never explained.

And many times throughout her life Sandy knew with a shock, when speaking to people whose childhood had been spent in Edinburgh, that there were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers, and with which she held only the names of districts and streets and monuments in common. Similarly, there were other people’s nineteen-thirties. There was a man who came to see her in the convent in her middle age, when she was at last allowed all those visitors. Many visitors were against the Rule, but a special dispensation was enforced on Sandy because of the treatise she had written that was so unexpectedly famed—“The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.”

“I must have been at school in Edinburgh at the same time as you, Sister Helena,” the man said.

Sandy, now some years Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, clutched the bars of the grille, as was her way, and peered at him through her little faint eyes and asked him to describe his school days and his school, and the Edinburgh he had known.

And it turned out, once more, that his was a different Edinburgh from Sandy’s. His school, where he was a boarder, had been cold and gray. His teachers had been supercilious Englishmen, “or near-Englishmen,” said the visitor, “with third-rate degrees,” and the school had always been lit with the sun, or in winter with a pearly north light. “But Edinburgh,” said the man, “was a beautiful city, more beautiful then than it is now. Of course, the slums have been cleared. The Old Town was always my favorite. We used to love to explore the Grassmarket, and so on. Architecturally speaking, there is no finer sight in Europe.”

“I once was taken on a walk through the Canongate,” Sandy said, “but I was frightened by the squalor.”

“Well, it was the thirties,” said the man. “Tell me, Sister Helena, what would you say was your greatest influence during the thirties? I mean, during your teens. Did you read Auden and Eliot?”

“No,” said Sandy.”

“We boys were very keen on Auden and that group, of course. We wanted to go and fight in the Spanish Civil War. On the Republican side, of course. Did you take sides in the Spanish Civil War at your school?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Sandy. “It was all different for us.”

“You weren’t a Catholic then, of course.”

“No,” said Sandy.

“The influences of one’s teens are very important,” said the man.

“Oh, yes,” said Sandy, “even if they provide something to react against.”

“What was your biggest influence, then, Sister Helena? Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?”

“Oh, no,” said Sandy. “But there was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.” She clutched the bars of the grille as if she wanted to escape from the dim parlor beyond, for she was not composed like the other nuns, who, when they received their rare visitors, sat well back in the darkness with folded hands. Sandy always leaned forward and peered, clutching the bars with both hands, and the other sisters remarked it and said that Sister Helena had too much to bear from the world since she had published her psychological book. But the dispensation was forced upon Sandy, and she clutched the bars and received the choice visitors—the psychologists, and the Catholic seekers, and the higher journalist ladies, and the academics who wanted to question her about her odd psychological treatise on the nature of moral perception.

“We will not go into St. Giles’,” said Miss Brodie, “because the day draws late. But I presume you have all been to St. Giles’ Cathedral?”

They had nearly all been in St. Giles’, with its tattered, bloodstained banners of the past. Sandy had not been there, and did not want to go. The outsides of old Edinburgh churches frightened her, they were of such dark stone, like presences, and were built so warningly, with their upraised fingers.

Miss Brodie had shown them a picture of Cologne Cathedral, like a wedding cake, which looked as if it had been built for pleasure and festivities, and parties given by the Prodigal Son in his early career. But the insides of Scottish churches were more reassuring, because during the services they contained people, and no ghosts at all. Sandy, Rose Stanley, and Monica Douglas were of believing though not churchgoing families. Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor were Presbyterians and went to Sunday school. Eunice Gardiner was Episcopalian and claimed that she did not believe in Jesus but in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Sandy, who believed in ghosts, felt that the Holy Ghost was a feasible proposition. The whole question was being laid open during this winter term by Miss Brodie, who, at the same time as adhering to the strict Church of Scotland habits of her youth and keeping the Sabbath, was now, in her prime, attending evening classes in comparative religion at the University. So her pupils heard all about it, and learned for the first time that some honest people did not believe in God, or even in Allah. But the girls were set to study the Gospels with diligence for their truth and goodness, and to read them aloud for their beauty.

Their walk had brought them into broad Chambers Street. The group had changed its order and was now walking three abreast, with Miss Brodie in front between Sandy and Rose. “I am summoned to see the headmistress at morning break on Monday,” said Miss Brodie. “I have no doubt Miss Mackay wishes to question my methods of instruction. It has happened before. It will happen again. Meanwhile, I follow my principles of education and give of my best in my prime. The word ‘education’ comes from the root ‘e,’ from ‘ex,’ ‘out,’ and ‘duco,’ ‘I lead.’ It means ‘a leading out.’ To me, education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay, it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion, from the Latin root prefix ‘in,’ meaning ‘in,’ and the stem ‘trudo,’ ‘I thrust.’ Miss Mackay’s method is to thrust a lot of information into the pupil’s head; mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education, as is proved by the root meaning. Now, Miss Mackay has accused me of putting ideas into my girls’ heads, but in fact that is her practice and mine is quite the opposite. Never let it be said that I put ideas into your heads. What is the meaning of education, Sandy?”

“To lead out,” said Sandy, who was composing a formal invitation to Alan Breck, a year and a day after their breathtaking flight through the heather.

“When I see Miss Mackay on Monday morning,” said Miss Brodie, “I shall point out that by the terms of my employment my methods cannot be condemned unless they can be proved to be in any part improper or subversive, and so long as the girls are in the least equipped for the end-of-term examination. I trust you girls to work hard and try and scrape through, even if you learn up the stuff and forget it next day. As for impropriety, it could never be imputed to me except by some gross distortion on the part of a traitor. I do not think ever to be betrayed. Miss Mackay is younger than I am and higher-salaried. That is by accident. The best qualifications available at the University in my time were inferior to those open to Miss Mackay. That is why she holds the senior position. But her reasoning power is deficient, and so I have no fears for Monday.”

“Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing,” said Rose.

“I can’t permit that type of remark to pass in my presence, Rose,” said Miss Brodie, “for it would be disloyal.”

They had come to the end of Lauriston Place, past the fire station, where they were to get on a tramcar to go to tea with Miss Brodie in her flat at Churchhill.

The days passed and the wind blew from the Forth.

It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime, or that she was in any way off her head. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties—women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion. But the progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character, like Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and it was in this that Miss Brodie was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place. She was not out of place among her own kind—the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries, who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-colored cheeks, constitutions like horses’, logical educations, hearty spirits, and private means. They could be seen leaning over the democratic counters of Edinburgh grocers’ shops, arguing with the manager at three in the afternoon on every subject from the authenticity of the Scriptures to the question what the word “guaranteed” on a jam jar really meant. They 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 . . .” They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar; they supported all the new little theatre companies: they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbors the arts of simple interior decoration; 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.

There was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie, then; she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they, perhaps rightly, had 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 the Miss Brodie who told her girls, “These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting by my prime,” was one whose nature was still in the making when the girls were well on in their teens. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen toward what extremities her nature worked. And the principles governing the end of her prime would have astonished herself at the beginning of it.

The summer holidays of 1931 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 now 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 signifies ‘the birth of spring.’ I wore my silk dress with the large red poppies, which is just right for my coloring. 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.

With her head up, up, Miss Brodie passed behind the headmistress and shut the door with the utmost meaning.

“I have only just looked in,” said Miss Mackay, “and I have to be off. Well, girls, this is the first day of the new session. Are we downhearted? No. You girls must work hard this year at every subject and pass your qualifying examination with flying colors. Next year you will be in the Senior School, remember. I hope you’ve all had a nice summer holiday—you all look nice and brown. I hope in due course of time to read your essays on how you spent them.”

When she had gone, Miss Brodie looked hard at the door for a long time. A girl, not of her set, called Judith, giggled. Miss Brodie said to Judith, “That will do.” She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long-division sum she always kept there in case of intrusion from outside during any arithmetic period when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic. When she had done this, she turned back to the class and said, “Are we downhearted no, are we downhearted no. As I was saying, Mussolini has performed feats of magnitude, and unemployment is even further abolished under him than it was last year. I shall be able to tell you a great deal this term. As you know, I don’t believe in talking down to children—you are capable of grasping more than is generally appreciated by your elders. Education means a leading out, from ‘e,’ ‘out,’ and ‘duco,’ ‘I lead.’ Qualifying examination or no qualifying examination, you will have the benefit of my experience in Italy. In Rome, I saw the Forum and I saw the Colosseum, where the gladiators died and the slaves were thrown to the lions. A vulgar American remarked to me, ‘It looks like a mighty fine quarry.’ They talk nasally. Mary, what does to talk nasally mean?”

Mary did not know.

“Stupid as ever,” said Miss Brodie. “Eunice?”

“Through your nose,” said Eunice.

“Answer in a complete sentence, please,” said Miss Brodie. “This year I think you should all start answering in complete sentences—I must try to remember this rule. Your correct answer is ‘To talk nasally means to talk through one’s nose.’ The American said, ‘It looks like a mighty fine quarry.’ Ah! It was there the gladiators fought. ‘Hail Caesar!’ she cried. ‘These about to die salute thee!’ ”

Miss Brodie stood in her brown dress like a gladiator, with raised arm and eyes flashing like a sword. “Hail Caesar” she cried again, turning radiantly to the window light, as if Caesar sat there. “Who opened the window?” said Miss Brodie, dropping her arm.

Nobody answered.

“Whoever has opened the window has opened it too wide,” said Miss Brodie. “Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things. We ought to be doing history at the moment, according to the timetable. Get out your history books and prop them up in your hands. I shall tell you a little more about Italy. I met a young poet by a fountain. Here is a picture of Dante meeting Beatrice—it is pronounced ‘Beatrichay’ in Italian, which makes the name very beautiful—on the Ponte Vecchio. He fell in love with her at that moment. Mary, sit up and don’t slouch. It was a sublime moment in a sublime love. By whom was the picture painted?”

Nobody knew.

“It was painted by Rossetti. Who was Rossetti, Jenny?”

“A painter,” said Jenny.

Miss Brodie looked suspicious.

“And a genius,” said Sandy, to come to Jenny’s rescue.

“A friend of—?” asked Miss Brodie.

“Swinburne,” said a girl.

Miss Brodie smiled. “You have not forgotten,” she said, looking round the class. “Holidays or no holidays. Keep your history books propped up, in case we have any further intruders.” She looked disapprovingly toward the door and lifted her fine dark Roman head with dignity. She had often told the girls that her dead Hugh had admired her head for its Roman appearance.

“Next year,” she said, “you will have the specialists to teach you history and mathematics and languages, a teacher for this and a teacher for that, a period of forty-five minutes for this and another for that. But in this, your last year with me, you will receive the fruits of my prime. They will remain with you all your days. First, however, I must mark the register for today before we forget. There are two new girls.”

They stood up with wide eyes while Miss Brodie sat down at her desk.

“You will get used to our ways. What religions are you?” said Miss Brodie, with her pen poised on the page while, outside in the sky, the gulls from the Firth of Forth wheeled over the school and the green-and-golden treetops swayed toward the windows.“Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray, And soothe me wi’ tidings O’ nature’s decay

��Robert Burns,” said Miss Brodie when she had closed the register. “We are now well into the nineteen-thirties. I have four pounds of rosy apples in my desk, a gift from Mr. Lowther’s orchard. Let us eat them now, while the coast is clear. Not but what the apples do not come under my own jurisdiction, but discretion is—? Discretion is—? Sandy?”

“The better part of valor, Miss Brodie.” Her little eyes looked at Miss Brodie in a slightly smaller way.

Even before the official opening of her prime, Miss Brodie’s colleagues in the Junior School had been gradually turning against her. The teaching staff of the Senior School was indifferent or mildly amused, for it had not yet felt the impact of the Brodie set; that was to come the following year, and even then these Senior mistresses were not unduly irritated by the effects of what they called Miss Brodie’s experimental methods. It was in the Junior School, among the lesser-paid and lesser-qualified women with whom Miss Brodie had daily dealings, that indignation seethed.

Two members of the staff, however, felt neither resentment nor indifference toward Miss Brodie but were, on the contrary, her supporters on every count. One of these was Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master for the whole school, Junior and Senior. The other was Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the Senior girls’ art master. They were the only men on the staff. Both were already a little in love with Miss Brodie, for they found in her the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment, and although they did not realize it, both were already beginning to act as rivals for her attention. But, so far, they had not engaged her attention as men; she knew them only as supporters, and was proudly grateful. It was the Brodie set who discerned that Mr. Lowther and Mr. Lloyd were at pains to appear well, each in his exclusive right, before Miss Brodie.

To the Brodie set, Gordon Lowther and Teddy Lloyd looked rather like each other until habitual acquaintance proved that they looked very different. Both were red gold in coloring. Teddy Lloyd, the art master, was by far the better shaped, the better featured, and the more sophisticated. He was said to be half Welsh, half English. He spoke with a hoarse voice, as if he had bronchitis all the time. A golden forelock fell over his forehead into his eyes. Most wonderful of all was his having only one arm, the right, with which he painted. The other was a sleeve tucked into his pocket.

Miss Brodie’s class had only once had an opportunity to size him up closely, and then it was in a dimmed light, for the blinds of the art room had been drawn to allow Mr. Lloyd to show his lantern slides. They had been marched into the art room by Miss Brodie, who was about to sit with the girls on the end of a bench when the art master came forward with a chair for her, held in his one hand and presented in a special way, with a tiny inflection of the knees, like a flunky. Miss Brodie seated herself nobly, like Britannia, with her legs apart under her loose brown skirt, which came well over her knees. Mr. Lloyd showed his pictures from an exhibition of Italian art in London. He had a pointer, with which he indicated the design of the picture in accompaniment to his hoarse voice. He said nothing of what the pictures represented, only followed each curve and line as the artist had left it off, perhaps at the point of an elbow, and picked it up, perhaps at the edge of a cloud or the back of a chair. The ladies of the “Primavera,” in their netball-playing postures, provided Mr. Lloyd with much pointer work. He kept passing the pointer along the lines of their bottoms, which showed through the drapery. The third time he did this, a collective quiver of mirth ran along the front row of girls, then spread to the back rows. They kept their mouths shut tight against these convulsions, but the tighter their lips, the more did the little gusts of humor escape through their noses. Mr. Lloyd looked round with offended exasperation.

“It is obvious,” said Miss Brodie, “that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd.”

The girls were instantly composed by the shock of this remark. But immediately Mr. Lloyd resumed his demonstration of artistic form Sandy affected to have a fit of spluttering coughs, as did several girls behind her. Others groped under their seat, as if looking for something they had dropped. One or two frankly leaned against each other and giggled, with hands to their helpless mouths.

“I am surprised at you, Sandy,” said Miss Brodie. “I thought you were the leaven in the lump.”

Sandy looked up from her coughs with a hypocritical blinking of her eyes. Miss Brodie, however, had already fastened on Mary Macgregor, who was nearest to her. Mary’s giggles had been caused by contagion, for she was too stupid to have any sex wits of her own, and Mr. Lloyd’s lesson would never have affected her unless it had first affected the rest of the class. But now she was giggling openly, like a dirty-minded child of an uncultured home. Miss Brodie grasped Mary’s arm, jerked her to her feet, and propelled her to the door, where she thrust her outside, returning as one who had solved the whole problem. As indeed she had, for the violent action sobered the girls and made them feel that, in the official sense, an unwanted ringleader had been apprehended and they were no longer in the wrong.

As Mr. Lloyd had now switched his equipment to a depiction of the Madonna and Child, Miss Brodie’s action was the more appreciated, for no one in the class would have felt comfortable at being seized with giggles while Mr. Lloyd’s pointer was tracing the outlines of this sacred subject. In fact, they were rather shocked that Mr. Lloyd’s hoarse voice did not change its tone but went on stating what the painter had done with his brush; he was almost defiant in his methodical tracing of lines all over the Mother and the Son. Sandy caught his glance toward Miss Brodie as if seeking her approval for his very artistic attitudes, and Sandy saw her smile back as would a goddess with superior understanding smile to a god away on the mountaintops.

It was not long after this that Monica Douglas, later famous for mathematics and anger, claimed that she had seen Mr. Lloyd in the act of kissing Miss Brodie. She was very definite about it in her report to the five other members of the Brodie set. There was a general excited difficulty in believing her.

“When?”

“Where?”

“In the art room, after school yesterday. He had his arm around her and was kissing her. They jumped apart when I opened the door.”

“What did they say?” Jenny said.

“They didn’t see me,” said Monica. “I just turned and ran away.”

“Was it a long and lingering kiss?” Sandy demanded, while Jenny came closer to hear the answer.

Monica cast the corner of her eye up to the ceiling as if she was doing mental arithmetic. When her calculation was finished, she said, “Yes, it was.”

“How do you know, if you didn’t stop to see how long it was?” Sandy said.

“I know,” said Monica, getting angry, “by the bit I did see.”

“I don’t believe all this,” Sandy said squeakily, because she was excited and wanted to prove the report true by eliminating the doubts. “You must have been dreaming.”

Monica pecked with the fingers of her right hand at Sandy’s arm, and pinched the skin of it with a nasty half turn. Sandy screamed. Monica, whose face was becoming very red, swung the attaché case that held her books, so that it hit the girls who stood in its path and made them stand back from her.

“She’s losing her temper,” said Eunice Gardiner, skipping.

“I don’t believe what she says,” said Sandy, desperately trying to visualize the scene in the art room and to goad factual Monica into describing it with due feeling.

“I believe it,” said Rose. “Mr. Lloyd is an artist and Miss Brodie is artistic, too.”

Jenny said, “Didn’t they see the door opening?”

“Yes,” said Monica.

“They jumped apart as I opened the door.”

“How do you know they didn’t see you?” Sandy said.

“I got away before they turned round. They were standing at the far end of the room beside the still-life curtain.” Monica went to the classroom door and demonstrated her quick getaway.

This was not dramatically satisfying to Sandy, who went out of the classroom, opened the door, looked, opened her eyes in a startled way, and retreated in a flash. She seemed satisfied by her experimental reënactment, but it so delighted her friends that she repeated it. On her fourth performance, which had reached a state of extreme flourish, Miss Brodie came up behind her.

“What are you doing, Sandy?” said Miss Brodie.

“Only playing,” said Sandy, photographing this new Miss Brodie with her little eyes.

The question of whether Miss Brodie was actually capable of being kissed and of kissing occupied the Brodie set till Christmas.

There was, indeed, a change in Miss Brodie. It was not merely that Sandy and Jenny, recasting her in their minds, now began to try to imagine her as someone called Jean. There was a change in herself. She wore newer clothes, and with them a glowing amber necklace, which was of such real amber that, she showed them once, it had magnetic properties when rubbed and then applied to a piece of paper. But the change in Miss Brodie was best discerned by comparison with the other teachers in the Junior School. If you looked at them and then looked at Miss Brodie, it was more possible to imagine her giving herself up to kissing.

Jenny and Sandy wondered if Mr. Lloyd and Miss Brodie had gone further that day in the art room, and had been swept away by passion. They kept an eye on Miss Brodie’s stomach to see if it showed signs of swelling. Some days, if they were bored, they decided it had begun to swell. But on Miss Brodie’s entertaining days they found her stomach as flat as ever, and at these times even agreed together that Monica Douglas had been telling a lie.

The other Junior School teachers said good morning to Miss Brodie these days in a more than Edinburgh manner—that is to say, it was gracious enough—and not one of them omitted to say good morning at all; but Sandy, who had turned eleven, perceived that the tone of “morning” made the word seem purposely to rhyme with “scorning,” so that these colleagues of Miss Brodie’s might just as well have been saying “I scorn you.” Miss Brodie’s reply was even more Anglicized in its accent than was its usual proud wont. “Good mawning,” she replied in the corridors, flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority, and deviating her head toward them no more than an insulting half inch. She held her head up, up, as she walked, and often, when she reached and entered her own classroom, permitted herself to sag gratefully against the door for an instant. She did not frequent the staff common rooms in the free periods when her class was taking its singing or sewing lessons, but accompanied them.

Now, the two sewing teachers were somewhat apart from the rest of the teaching staff and were not taken seriously. They were the two younger sisters of a third, dead, elder sister whose guidance of their lives had never been replaced. Their names were Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr. They were incapable of imparting any information whatsoever, so flustered were they, with their fluffed-out hair, dry blue-gray skin, and birds’ eyes; instead of teaching sewing, they took each girl’s work in hand, one by one, and did most of it for her. In the worst cases, they unstitched what had been done and did it again, saying “This’ll not do,” or “That’s never a run-and-fell seam.” The sewing sisters had not as yet been induced to judge Miss Brodie, since they were of the belief that their scholastic colleagues were above criticism. Therefore, the sewing lessons were a great relaxation to all, and Miss Brodie, in the time before Christmas, used the sewing period each week to read “Jane Eyre” to her class, who, while they listened, pricked their thumbs as much as was bearable so that interesting little spots of blood might appear on the stuff they were sewing, and it was even possible to make blood-spot designs.

The singing lessons were far different. Some weeks after the report of her kissing in the art room, it gradually became plain that Miss Brodie was agitated before, during, and after the singing lessons. She wore her newest clothes on singing days.

Sandy said to Monica Douglas, “Are you sure it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her? Are you sure it wasn’t Mr. Lowther?”

“It was Mr. Lloyd,” said Monica, “and it was in the art room, not the music room. What would Mr. Lowther have been doing in the art room?”

“They look alike, Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther,” Sandy said.

Monica’s anger was rising in her face. “It was Mr. Lloyd, with his one arm round her,” she said. “I saw them. I’m sorry I ever told you. Rose is the only one that believes me.”

Rose Stanley believed her, but this was because she was indifferent. Of all the Brodie set, she was the least excited by Miss Brodie’s love affairs, or by anyone else’s sex. And it was always to be the same. Later, her magnificently appealing qualities lay in the fact that she had no curiosity about sex at all; she never reflected upon it. As Miss Brodie was to say, she had instinct.

“Rose is the only one who believes me,” said Monica Douglas.

“When she visited Sandy at the nunnery, in the late nineteen-fifties,” Monica said, “I really did see Teddy Lloyd kiss Miss Brodie in the art room one day.”

“I know you did,” said Sandy.

She knew it even before Miss Brodie had told her so one day after the end of the war, when they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel eating sandwiches and drinking tea, which Miss Brodie’s rations at home would not run to. Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark muskrat coat. She had been retired beforetime. She said, “I am past my prime.”

“It was a good prime,” said Sandy.

They looked out of the wide windows at the little Braid Burn trickling through the fields, and at the hills beyond, so austere from everlasting that they had not been capable of losing anything by the war.

“Teddy Lloyd was greatly in love with me, as you know,” said Miss Brodie, “and I with him. It was a great love. One day in the art room, he kissed me. We never became lovers, not even after you left Edinburgh, when the temptation was strongest.”

Sandy stared through her little eyes at the hills.

“But I renounced him,” said Miss Brodie. “He was a married man. I renounced the great love of my prime. We had everything in common—the artistic nature.”

She had reckoned on her prime’s lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie’s last and fifty-sixth year. She looked older than that; she was suffering from an internal growth. This was her last year in the world, and, in another sense, it was Sandy’s.

Miss Brodie sat in her defeat and said, “In the late autumn of 1931— Are you listening, Sandy?”

Sandy took her eyes from the hills.

In the late autumn of 1931, Miss Brodie was away from school for two weeks. It was understood she had an ailment. The Brodie set called at her flat after school with flowers, and found no one at home. On inquiring at school next day, they were told she had gone to the country to stay with a friend until she was better.

Miss Brodie’s class was dispersed and squashed in among the classes of her colleagues. The Brodie set stuck together and were placed with a gaunt woman, who was, in fact, a Miss Gaunt, from the Western Isles, who wore a knee-length skirt made from what looked like gray blanket stuff. This had never been smart even in the knee-length days; Rose Stanley said it was cut short for economy. Miss Gaunt’s head was very large and bony. Her chest was a slight bulge flattened by a bust bodice, and her jersey was a dark, forbidding green. She did not care at all for the Brodie set, who were stunned by a sudden plunge into industrious learning and very put out by Miss Gaunt’s horrible sharpness and strict insistence on silence throughout the day.

“Oh dear,” said Rose out loud one day when they were settled to essay-writing. “I can’t remember how you spell ‘possession.’ Are there two ‘s’s or—?”

“A hundred lines of ‘Marmion’!” Miss Gaunt flung at her.

By the end of the first week, the black-marks book, which eventually reflected itself on the end-of-term reports, was heavily scored with the names of the Brodie set. Apart from inquiring their names for this purpose, Miss Gaunt did not trouble to remember them. “You, girl,” she would say to every Brodie face. So dazed were the Brodie girls, they did not notice the omission during that week of their singing lesson, which should have been on Wednesday.

On Thursday, they were herded into the sewing room in the early afternoon. Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr seemed rather cowed by gaunt Miss Gaunt, and applied themselves briskly to the sewing machines, which they were teaching the girls to use. The shuttle of the sewing machines going up and down usually caused Sandy and Jenny to giggle, since at that time everything that could conceivably bear a sexual interpretation immediately did so to them. But the absence of Miss Brodie and the presence of Miss Gaunt had a definite subtracting effect from the sexual significance of everything, and the trepidation of the two sewing sisters contributed to the effect of grim realism.

Miss Gaunt evidently went to the same parish church as the Kerr sisters, to whom she addressed remarks from time to time while she embroidered a tray cloth. “My brothurr,” she kept saying. “My brothurr says . . .”

Miss Gaunt’s brother was apparently the minister of the parish, which accounted for the extra precautions Miss Alison and Miss Ellen were taking about their work today, with the result that they got a lot of the sewing mixed up.

“My brothurr is up in the morning at five-thirty. My brothurr organized a . . .”

Sandy and Jenny were sitting together at one of the sewing tables. Sandy was thinking of the next installment of “Jane Eyre,” which Miss Brodie usually enlivened this hour by reading. Sandy had done with Alan Breck and had taken up with Mr. Rochester, with whom she now sat in the garden.

“You are afraid of me, Miss Sandy.”

“You talk like the Sphinx, sir, but I am not afraid.”

“You have such a grave, quiet manner, Miss Sandy—you are going?”

“It has struck nine, sir.”

A phrase of Miss Gaunt’s broke upon the garden scene. “Mr. Lowther is not at school this week.”

“So I hear,” Miss Alison said.

“It seems he will be away for another week, at least.”

“Is he ill?”

“I understand so, unfortunately,” said Miss Gaunt.

“Miss Brodie is ailing, too,” said Miss Ellen.

“Yes,” said Miss Gaunt. “She, too, is expected to be absent for another week.”

“What is the trouble?”

“That I couldn’t say,” said Miss Gaunt. She stuck her needle in and out of her embroidery. Then she looked up at the sisters. “It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther,” she said.

Sandy saw her face as that of the housekeeper in “Jane Eyre,” watching her carefully and knowingly as she entered the house, late, from the garden where she had been sitting with Mr. Rochester.

“Perhaps Miss Brodie is having a love affair with Mr. Lowther,” Sandy said in a low voice to Jenny, merely in order to break up the sexless gloom that surrounded them.

“But it was Mr. Lloyd who kissed her. She must be in love with Mr. Lloyd or she wouldn’t have let him kiss her.”

“Perhaps she’s working it off on Mr. Lowther. Mr. Lowther isn’t married.”

It was a fantasy worked up between them, in defiance of Miss Gaunt and her forbidding brother, and it was understood in that way. But Sandy, remembering Miss Gaunt’s expression as she remarked, “It may be Miss Brodie has the same complaint as Mr. Lowther,” was suddenly not sure that the suggestion was not true. For this reason she was more reticent than Jenny about the details of the imagined love affair.

Jenny whispered, “They go to bed. Then he puts out the light. Then their toes touch. And then Miss Brodie—Miss Brodie—” She broke into giggles.

“Miss Brodie yawns,” said Sandy, in order to restore decency now that she suspected it was all true.

“No, Miss Brodie says ‘Darling.’ She says—”

“Quiet,” whispered Sandy. “Eunice is coming.”

Eunice Gardiner approached their table, grabbed the scissors, and went away. Eunice had lately taken a religious turn and there was no talking about sex in front of her. She had stopped hopping and skipping. The phase did not last long, but while it did she was nasty and not to be trusted.

In that year after the war when Sandy sat with Miss Brodie in the window of the Braid Hills Hotel, and brought her eyes back from the hills to show she was listening, Miss Brodie said, “I renounced Teddy Lloyd. But decided to enter into a love affair—it was the only cure. My love for Teddy was an obsession; he was the love of my prime. But in the autumn of 1931, I entered an affair with Gordon Lowther. He was a bachelor and it was more becoming. That is the truth, and there is no more to say. Are you listening, Sandy?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“You look as if you were thinking of something else, my dear. Well, as I say, that is the whole story.”

Sandy was thinking of something else. She was thinking that it was not the whole story.

“Of course the liaison was suspected. Perhaps you girls knew about it. You, Sandy, had a faint idea—but nobody could prove what was between Gordon Lowther and myself. It was never proved. It was not on those grounds that I was betrayed. I should like to know who betrayed me. It is incredible that it should have been one of my own girls. I often wonder if it was poor Mary. Perhaps I should have been nicer to Mary. Well, it was tragic about Mary. I picture that fire, that poor girl. I can’t see how Mary could have betrayed me, though.”

“She had no contact with the school after she left,” Sandy said.

“I wonder, was it Rose who betrayed me?”

The whine in her voice (“betrayed me, betrayed me”) bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years and four months, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by “betray”? She was looking at the hills, as if to see there the first and unbetrayable Miss Brodie, indifferent to criticism as a crag.

After her two weeks’ absence, Miss Brodie returned to tell her class that she had enjoyed an exciting rest and a well-earned one. Mr. Lowther’s singing class went on as usual, and he beamed at Miss Brodie as she brought them proudly into the music room with their heads up, up. Miss Brodie now played the accompaniment, sitting very well at the piano, and sometimes, with certain sadness of countenance, richly taking the second soprano in “How Sweet Is the Shepherd’s Sweet Lot” and other melodious preparations for the annual concert. Mr. Lowther, short-legged, shy, and golden-haired, no longer played with Jenny’s curls.

The bare branches brushed the windows, and Sandy was as sure as could be that the singing master was in love with Miss Brodie and that Miss Brodie was in love with the art master. It was impossible to imagine Miss Brodie sleeping with Mr. Lowther; it was impossible to imagine her in a sexual context at all—and yet it was impossible not to suspect that such things were so.

During the Easter term, Miss Mackay, the headmistress, had the girls in to tea in her study in small groups and, later, one by one. This was a routine of inquiry as to their intentions for the Senior School, whether they would go on the Modern side or whether they would apply for admission to the Classical.

Miss Brodie had already prompted them. “I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they’re equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely.” The girls were left in no doubt as to Miss Brodie’s contempt for the Modern side.

From among her special set, only Eunice Gardiner stood out to be a Modern, and that was because her parents wanted her to take a course in domestic science and she herself wanted the extra scope for gymnastics and games that the Modern side offered. Eunice, preparing arduously for confirmation, was still a bit too pious for Miss Brodie’s liking. She refused to do somersaults outside of the gymnasium; she wore lavender water on her handkerchief, declined a try of Rose Stanley’s aunt’s lipstick, was taking a suspiciously healthy interest in international sport, and, when, the term before, Miss Brodie had herded her set to the Empire Theatre for their first and last opportunity to witness the dancing of Pavlova, Eunice was absent—she had pleaded off because of something else she had to attend, which she described as “a social.”

“Social what?” said Miss Brodie, who always made difficulties about words when she scented heresy.

“It’s in the Church Hall, Miss Brodie.”

“Yes, yes, but social what? ‘Social’ is an adjective, and you are using it as a noun. If you mean a social gathering, by all means attend your social gathering and we shall have our own social gathering in the presence of the great Anna Pavlova, a dedicated woman who, when she appears on the stage, makes the other dancers look like elephants. By all means attend your social gathering. We shall see Pavlova doing the death of the swan. It is a great moment in eternity.”

All that term, she tried to inspire Eunice to become at least a pioneer missionary in some deadly and dangerous zone of the earth, for it was intolerable to Miss Brodie that any of her girls should grow up not largely dedicated to a vocation. “You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine,” she said warningly to Eunice, who was, in fact, secretly attracted to this idea and who lived in Corstorphine. The term was filled with legends of Pavlova and her dedicated habits, her wild fits of temperament, and her intolerance of the second-rate. “She screams at the chorus,” said Miss Brodie, “which is permissible in a great artist. She speaks English fluently—her accent is charming. Afterward, she goes home to meditate upon the swans that she keeps on a lake in the grounds.”

“Sandy,” said Anna Pavlova, “you are the only truly dedicated dancer, next to me. Your dying swan is perfect—such a sensitive, final tap of the claw upon the floor of the stage. . . .”

“I know it,” said Sandy (in considered preference to “Oh, I do my best”) as she relaxed in the wings.

Miss Brodie said, “Pavlova contemplates her swans in order to perfect her swan dance—she studies them. That is true dedication. You must all grow up to be dedicated women, as I have dedicated myself to you.”

Sitting up in bed in the nursing home a few weeks before she died, Miss Brodie learned from Monica Douglas that Sandy had gone to a convent.“What a waste,” she said. “That is not the sort of dedication I meant. Do you think she has done this to annoy me? I begin to wonder if it was not Sandy who betrayed me.”

The headmistress invited Sandy, Jenny, and Mary to tea just before the Easter holidays, and asked them the usual questions about what they wanted to do in the Senior School and whether they wanted to do it on the Modern or the Classical side. Mary Macgregor was ruled out of the Classical side, because her marks did not reach the required standard. She seemed despondent on hearing this.

“Why do you want so much to go on the Classical side, Mary?” the headmistress asked her. “You aren’t cut out for it. Don’t your parents realize that?”

“Miss Brodie prefers it.”

When Jenny and Sandy opted for Classical, Miss Mackay said, “Because Miss Brodie prefers it, I suppose. What good will Latin and Greek be to you when you get married or take a job? German would be more useful.”

But they stuck out for Classical, and when Miss Mackay had accepted their choice she transparently started to win over the girls by praising Miss Brodie. “What we would do without Miss Brodie I don’t know. There is always a difference about Miss Brodie’s girls, and the last two years, I may say, a marked difference.” Then she began to pump them. Miss Brodie took them to the theatre, the art galleries, for walks, to Miss Brodie’s fiat for tea? How kind of Miss Brodie. “Does Miss Brodie pay for all your theatre tickets?”

“Sometimes,” said Mary.

“Not for all of us every time,” said Jenny.

“We go up to the gallery,” Sandy said.

“Well, it is most kind of Miss Brodie. I hope you are appreciative.”

“Oh, yes,” they said, united and alert against anything unfavorable to the Brodie idea that the conversation might be leading up to.

This was not lost on the headmistress. “That’s splendid,” she said. “And do you go to concerts with Miss Brodie? Miss Brodie is very musical, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Mary, looking at her friends for a lead.

“We went to the opera with Miss Brodie last term to see ‘La Traviata,’ ” Jenny said.

“Miss Brodie is musical?” said Miss Mackay again, addressing Sandy and Jenny.

“I think Miss Brodie is more interested in art, ma’am,” said Sandy.

“But music is a form of art.”

“Pictures and drawings, I mean,” said Sandy.

“Very enlightening,” said Miss Mackay. “Do you girls take piano lessons?”

They all said yes.

“From whom? From Mr. Lowther?”

They answered variously, for Mr. Lowther’s piano lessons were not part of the curriculum and these three girls had private arrangements for the piano at home. But now, at the mention of Mr. Lowther, even slow-minded Mary suspected what Miss Mackay was driving at.

“I understand Miss Brodie plays the piano for your singing lessons. So what makes you think she prefers art to music, Sandy?”

“Miss Brodie told us so. Music is an interest to her, but art is a passion, Miss Brodie said.”

“And what are your cultural interests? I’m sure you are too young to have passions.”

“Stories, ma’am,” Mary said.

“Does Miss Brodie tell you stories?”

“Yes,” said Mary.

“What about?”

“History,” said Jenny and Sandy together, because it was a question they had foreseen might arise one day, and they had prepared the answer with a brain-racking care for literal truth.

Miss Mackay paused and looked at them in the process of moving the cake from the table to the tray; their reply had plainly struck her as being on the ready side. She asked no further questions, but made the following noteworthy speech: “You are very fortunate in Miss Brodie. I could wish your arithmetic papers had been better. I am always impressed by Miss Brodie’s girls in one way or another. You will have to work hard at ordinary humble subjects for the qualifying examination. Miss Brodie is giving you an excellent preparation for the Senior School. Culture cannot compensate for lack of hard knowledge. I am happy to see you are devoted to Miss Brodie. Your loyalty is due to the school rather than to any one individual.”

Not all of this conversation was reported back to Miss Brodie. “We told Miss Mackay how much you liked art,” said Sandy, however.

“I do indeed,” said Miss Brodie. “But ‘like’ is hardly the word—pictorial art is my passion.”

“That’s what I said,” said Sandy.

Miss Brodie looked at her as if to say—as, in fact, she had said twice before—“One day, Sandy, you will go too far for my liking.”

“Compared to music,” said Sandy, blinking up at her with her little piglike eyes.

Returning from the holiday, Miss Brodie told her class, first thing, “I have spent Easter at the little Roman village of Cramond.” That was where Mr. Lowther lived all alone in a big house with a housekeeper.

In the course of the morning, Miss Brodie, wanting a supply of drawing books and charcoal to start the new term, sent Monica Douglas to fetch them from the art room, then called her back and sent Rose Stanley instead. When Rose returned, laden with drawing books and boxes of chalks, she was followed by Teddy Lloyd, similarly laden. He dumped his books and asked Miss Brodie if she had enjoyed her holiday. She gave him her hand, and said she had been exploring Cramond—one should not neglect these little nearby seaports.

“I shouldn’t have thought there was much to explore at Cramond,” said Mr. Lloyd, smiling at her, with his golden forelock falling into his eye.

“It has quite a lot of charm,” she said. “And did you go away at all?”

“I’ve been painting,” he said, in his hoarse voice. “Family portraits.”

Rose had been stacking the drawing books into their cupboard, and now she had finished. As she turned, Miss Brodie put her arm around Rose’s shoulders and thanked Mr. Lloyd for his help, as if she and Rose were one.

“N’tall,” said Mr. Lloyd, meaning “Not at all,” and went away. It was then Jenny whispered, “Rose has changed in the holidays, hasn’t she?”

This was true. Rose’s fair hair was cut shorter and was very shiny. Her cheeks were paler and thinner, her eyes less wide open, yet with the lids half shut, as if she were posing for a special photograph.

“Perhaps she has got the Change,” said Sandy. Miss Brodie called it the menarche, but so far when they tried to use this word amongst themselves it made them giggle and feel shy.

During their last few months in the Junior School, Miss Brodie made herself adorable. She did not exhort or bicker, and even when hard pressed was irritable only with Mary Macgregor. That spring, she monopolized with her class the benches under the elm, from which could be seen an endless avenue of dark-pink May trees, and where could be heard the trotting of horses in time to the turning wheels of light carts returning home empty, by a hidden lane, from their early-morning rounds. Not far off, like a promise of next year, a group of girls from the Senior School were doing first-form Latin. Once, the Latin mistress was moved by the spring of the year to sing a folk song to fit the clip-clop of the ponies and carts, and Miss Brodie held up her index finger with delight so that her own girls should listen, too.“Nundinarum adest dies. Mulus die nos vehet. Eie, curre, mule, mule, I tolutari gradu.”

That spring, Jenny’s mother was expecting a baby; there was no rain worth remembering; the grass, the sun, and the birds lost their self-centered winter mood and began to think of others. Miss Brodie’s old love story was newly embroidered, under the elm, with curious threads. It appeared that, while on leave from the war, her late fiancé had frequently taken her out sailing in a fishing boat, and that they had spent some of their merriest times among the rocks and pebbles of a small seaport. “Sometimes Hugh would sing—he had a rich tenor voice. At other times he fell silent and would set up his easel and paint. He was very talented at both arts, but I think the painter was the real Hugh.”

This was the first time the girls had heard of Hugh’s artistic leanings. Sandy puzzled over this and took counsel with Jenny, and it came to them both that Miss Brodie was making her new love story fit the old. Thereafter, the two girls listened with double ears and the rest of the class with single. Sandy was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and was divided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct.

Sandy and Jenny completed the love story of Miss Brodie and the singing master at half term. They were staying in the small town of Crail, on the coast of Fife, with Jenny’s aunt, who showed herself suspicious of their notebook, and so they took it off to a neighboring village along the coast by bus, and sat at the mouth of a cave to finish the work. It had been a delicate question how to present Miss Brodie in both a favorable and an unfavorable light, for now, as their last term with Miss Brodie drew to a close, nothing less than this was demanded.

That intimacy had taken place was to be established. But not on an ordinary bed. That had been a thought suitable only for the enlivening of a sewing period; Miss Brodie was entitled to something like a status. They placed Miss Brodie on the lofty lion’s back of Arthur’s Seat, with only the sky for roof and bracken for a bed. The broad parkland rolled away beneath her gaze to the accompanying flash and crash of a thunderstorm. It was here that Gordon Lowther, shy and smiling, small, with a long body and short legs, his red-gold hair and mustache, found her.

“Took her,” Jenny had said when they first talked it over.

“Took her—well, no. She gave herself to him.”

“She gave herself to him,” Jenny said, “although she would fain have given herself to another.”

When they had recorded these stirring revelations, they read the whole story from beginning to end. They were undecided then whether to cast this incriminating document out to sea or to bury it. The act of casting things out to sea from the shore was, as they knew, more difficult than it sounded. But Sandy found a damp hole half hidden by a stone at the back of the cave, and they pressed into it the notebook containing the love story of Miss Jean Brodie, and never saw it again. They walked back to Crail over the very springy turf, full of fresh plans.

“I have enough gunpowder in this jar to blow up this school,” said Miss Lockhart, in even tones.

She stood behind her bench in her white linen coat, with both hands on a glass jar three-quarters full of a dark-gray powder. The extreme hush that fell was only what she expected, for she always opened the first science lesson with these words and with the gunpowder before her, and the first science lesson was no lesson at all but a naming of the most impressive objects in the science room. Every eye was upon the jar. Miss Lockhart lifted it and placed it carefully in a cupboard that was filled with similar jars full of different-colored crystals and powders.

“These are Bunsen burners, this is a test tube, this is a pipette, that’s a burette, that is a retort, a crucible . . .”

Thus she established her mysterious priesthood. She was quite the nicest teacher in the Senior School. But they were all the nicest teachers in the school. It was a new life altogether, almost a new school. Here were no gaunt mistresses like Miss Gaunt, those many who had stalked past Miss Brodie in the corridors saying good morning with predestination in their smiles. The teachers here seemed to have no thought of anyone’s personality apart from their own specialty in life, whether it was mathematics, Latin, or science. They treated the new first-formers as if they were not real but only to be dealt with, like symbols of algebra, and Miss Brodie’s pupils found this refreshing at first.

Wonderful, too, during the first week, was the curriculum of dazzling new subjects, and the rushing to and from room to room to keep to the timetable. Their days were now filled with unfamiliar shapes and sounds, which were magically dissociated from ordinary life—the great circles and triangles of geometry, the hieroglyphics of Greek on the page, and the curious hisses and spits some of the Greek sounds made from the teacher’s lips—“psst . . . psooch. . . .” A mademoiselle with black frizzy hair, who wore a striped shirt with real cufflinks, was pronouncing French in a foreign way that never really caught on. The science room smelled unevenly of the Bunsen burners and the sweet autumnal smoke that drifted in from the first burning leaves. In the science room—strictly not to be referred to as a laboratory—lessons were called experiments, which gave everyone the feeling that not even Miss Lockhart knew what the result might be, and anything might occur between their going in and coming out and the school might blow up.

Here, during that first week, an experiment was conducted that involved magnesium, in a test tube, which was made to tickle a Bunsen flame. Eventually, from different parts of the room, great white magnesium flares shot out of the test tubes and were caught in larger glass vessels that waited for the purpose. Mary Macgregor took fright and ran in panic between the benches, hither and thither, from one white flame to another, until she was caught and induced to calm down, and she was told not to be so stupid by Miss Lockhart, who already had learned the exasperation of looking at Mary’s face—its two eyes, nose, and mouth, with nothing more to say about it.

Once, in later years, when Sandy was visited at the convent by Rose Stanley and they fell to speaking of dead Mary Macgregor, Sandy said, “When any ill befalls me, I wish I had been nicer to Mary.”

“How were we to know?” said Rose.

The Brodie set might easily have lost its identity at this time, not only because Miss Brodie had ceased to preside over their days, which were now so brisk with the getting of knowledge from unsoulful experts, but also because the headmistress intended them to be dispersed. She laid a scheme, and it failed. It was too ambitious; it aimed at ridding the school of Miss Brodie and breaking up the Brodie set in the one stroke. She befriended Mary Macgregor, thinking her to be gullible and bribable, and underrating her stupidity. She remembered that Mary had, in common with all Miss Brodie’s girls, applied to go on the Classical side but had been refused. Now Miss Mackay changed her mind and allowed Mary to take at least Latin. In return, she expected to be informed concerning Miss Brodie. But as the only reason that Mary had wanted to learn Latin was to please Miss Brodie, the headmistress got no further. Give the girl tea as she might, Mary simply did not understand what was required of her, and thought all the teachers were in league together, Miss Brodie and all.

“You won’t be seeing much of Miss Brodie,” said Miss Mackay, “now that you are in the Senior School.”

“I see,” said Mary, taking the remark as an edict rather than a probing question.

Miss Mackay laid another scheme, and the scheme undid her. There was a highly competitive house system in the Senior School, whose four houses were named Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll, and Biggar. Miss Mackay saw to it that the Brodie girls were, as far as possible, placed in different houses. Jenny was put in Holyrood, Sandy with Mary Macgregor in Melrose, Monica and Eunice in Argyll, and Rose Stanley in Biggar. They were therefore obliged to compete with each other in every walk of life within the school, and on the wind-swept hockey fields that lay like the graves of the martyrs exposed to the weather in an outer suburb. It was the team spirit that counted now, they were told; every house must go all out for the Shield and turn up on Saturday mornings to yell encouragement to the house. Interhouse friendships must not suffer, of course, but the team spirit . . .

This phrase was enough for the Brodie set, who, after two years with Miss Brodie, had been well directed as to its meaning. “Phrases like ‘the team spirit’ are always employed to cut across individualism, love, and personal loyalties,” she had said. “Ideas like ‘the team spirit,’ ” she said, “ought not to be enjoined on the female sex, especially if they are of that dedicated nature whose virtues from time immemorial have been utterly opposed to the concept. Florence Nightingale knew nothing of the team spirit—her mission was to save life regardless of the team to which it belonged. Cleopatra knew nothing of the team spirit, if you read your Shakespeare. Take Helen of Troy. And the Queen of England. It is true she attends international sport, but she has to—it is all empty show. She is concerned only with the King’s health and antiques. Where would the team spirit have got Sybil Thorndike? She is the great actress and the rest of the cast have got the team spirit. Pavlova . . .”

Perhaps Miss Brodie had foreseen this moment of the future when her team of six should be exposed to the appeal of four different competing spirits—Argyll, Melrose, Biggar, and Holyrood. It was impossible to know how much she worked by instinct alone. However, in this, the first test of her strength, she had the victory. Not one of the Senior house prefects personified an argument to touch Sybil Thorndike and Cleopatra. The Brodie set would as soon have entered the Girl Guides as the team spirit, and they kept away from the playing grounds except under compulsion. No one save Eunice Gardiner got near to being put in any team to try her spirit upon. Everyone agreed that Eunice was so good on the field she could not help it.

On most Saturday afternoons, Miss Brodie entertained her old set at tea and listened to their new experiences. She did not think much of her new pupils’ potentialities, she told them, and she described some of her new little girls and made the old ones laugh, which bound her set together more than ever and made them feel chosen. Sooner or later, she inquired what they were doing in the art class, for now the girls were taught by golden-locked, one-armed Teddy Lloyd.

There was always a great deal to tell about the art lesson. Their first day, Mr. Lloyd found difficulty in keeping order. After so many unfamiliar packed hours and periods of different exact subjects, the girls immediately felt the relaxing nature of the art room, and brimmed over with relaxation. Mr. Lloyd shouted at them, in his hoarse voice, to shut up. This was most bracing. He was attempting to explain the nature and appearance of an ellipse by holding up a saucer in his one hand high above his head, then lower. But his romantic air and his hoarse “Shut up!” had produced a reaction of giggles varying in tone and pitch.

“If you girls don’t shut up, I’ll smash this saucer to the floor,” he said.

They tried but failed to shut up.

He smashed the saucer to the floor.

Amid the dead silence that followed, he picked on Rose Stanley and, indicating the fragments of saucer on the floor, he said, “You with the profile—pick them up.”

He turned away and went and did something else at the other end of the long room for the rest of the period, while the girls looked anew at Rose Stanley’s profile, marvelled at Mr. Lloyd’s style, and settled down to drawing a bottle set up in front of a curtain. Jenny remarked to Sandy that Miss Brodie really had good taste.

“He has an artistic temperament, of course,” said Miss Brodie when she was told about the saucer. And when she heard that he had called Rose “you with the profile,” she looked at Rose in a special way, while Sandy looked at Miss Brodie.

The interest of Sandy and Jenny in Miss Brodie’s lovers had entered a new phase since they had buried their composition and moved up to the Senior School. They no longer saw everything in a sexual context; it was now, rather, a question of plumbing the deep heart’s core. The world of pure sex seemed years away. Jenny had turned twelve. Her mother had recently given birth to a baby boy, and the event had not moved them even to speculate upon its origin.

“There’s not much time for sex research in the Senior School,” Sandy said.

“I feel I’m past it,” said Jenny. This was strangely true, and she did not again experience her early sense of erotic wonder in life until suddenly one day when she was nearly forty, an actress of moderate reputation married to a theatrical manager. It happened she was standing with a man whom she did not know very well outside a famous building in Rome, waiting for the rain to stop. She was surprised by a reawakening of that same buoyant and airy discovery of sex, a total sensation that it was not possible to say was physical or mental but only that it contained the lost and guileless delight of her eleventh year. She supposed herself to have fallen in love with the man, who might, she thought, have been moved toward her in his own way out of a world of his own. There was nothing whatever to be done about it, for Jenny had been contentedly married for sixteen years past, but the concise happening filled her with astonishment whenever it came to mind in later days, and with a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things.

“Mr. Lowther’s housekeeper has left him,” said Miss Brodie one Saturday afternoon. “It is most ungrateful—that house at Cramond is easily run. I never cared for her, as you know. I think she resented my position as Mr. Lowther’s friend and confidante, and seemed dissatisfied by my visits. Mr. Lowther is composing some music for song at the moment. He ought to be encouraged.”

The next Saturday, she told the girls that the sewing sisters, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr, had taken on the temporary task of housekeepers to Mr. Lowther, since they lived near Cramond. “I think those sisters are inquisitive,” Miss Brodie remarked. “They are too much in with Miss Gaunt and the Church of Scotland.”

On Saturday afternoons, an hour was spent on her Greek lessons, for she had insisted that Jenny and Sandy should teach her Greek at the same time as they learned it. “There is an old tradition for this practice,” said Miss Brodie. “Many families in the olden days could afford to send but one child to school, whereupon that one scholar of the family imparted to the others in the evening what he had learned in the morning. I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I, too, can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

She progressed in Greek, although she was somewhat muddled about the accents, being differently informed by Jenny and Sandy, who took turns imparting to her their weekly intake of the language. But she was determined to enter and share the new life of her special girls, and what she did not regard as humane of their new concerns, or what was not within the scope of her influence, she scorned. She said, “It is witty to say that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that a circle is a plane figure bounded by one line, every point of which is equidistant from a fixed center. It is plain witty. Everyone knows what a straight line and a circle are.”

When, after the examinations at the end of the first term, she looked at the papers they had been set, she read some of the more vulnerable of the questions aloud with the greatest contempt: “ ‘A window cleaner carries a uniform 60-lb. ladder 15 ft. long, at one end of which a bucket of water weighing 40 lbs. is hung. At what point must he support the ladder to carry it horizontally? Where is the c.g. of his load?’ ” Miss Brodie looked at the paper, after reading out this question, as if to indicate that she could not believe her eyes. She gave the girls to understand that the solution to such problems would be quite useless to Sybil Thorndike, Anna Pavlova, and the late Helen of Troy.

But the Brodie set were on the whole still dazzled by their new subjects. It was never the same in later years, when the languages of physics and chemistry, algebra and geometry had lost their elemental strangeness and formed each an individual department of life, with its own accustomed boredom, and became hard work. Even stupid Mary Macgregor amazed herself by understanding Caesar’s “Gallic Wars,” which as yet made no demands on her defective imagination and the words of which were easier to her than English to spell and pronounce; until suddenly one day it appeared from an essay she had been obliged to write that she believed the document to date from the time of Samuel Pepys—and then Mary was established in the wrong again, being tortured with probing questions, and generally led on to confess to the mirth-shaken world her notion that Latin and shorthand were one.

Miss Brodie had a hard fight of it during those first few months when the Senior School had captivated her girls, displaying as they did that capacity for enthusiasm she herself had implanted. But having won the battle over the team spirit, she did not despair. It was evident that her main concern was lest the girls should become personally attached to anyone of the Senior teachers, but she carefully refrained from direct attack, because the teachers themselves seemed so perfectly indifferent to her brood.

By the next term, the girls’ favorite hours were those spent unbrainfully in the gymnasium, swinging about on parallel bars, hanging upside down on wall bars, or climbing ropes to the ceiling, all competing with agile Eunice to heave themselves up by hands, knees, and feet like monkeys climbing a tropical creeper. By the next term, to stave off the onslaughts of boredom and to reconcile the necessities of the working day with their love for Miss Brodie, Sandy and Jenny had begun to apply their new-found knowledge to Miss Brodie in a merry fashion. “If Miss Brodie was weighed in air and then in water . . .”

Presently, in the late spring of 1933, Miss Brodie’s Greek lessons on a Saturday afternoon came to an end, because of the needs of Mr. Lowther, who, in his house at Cramond, which the girls had not yet seen, was being catered for quite willingly by those sewing mistresses, Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr. Living on the coast nearby, it was simple for them to go over turn by turn and see to Mr. Lowther after school hours, and to prepare his supper and layout provision for his breakfast; it was not only simple, it was enjoyable to be doing good, and it was also profitable in a genteel way. On Saturdays, either Miss Ellen or Miss Alison would count his laundry and keep house for him. On some Saturday mornings, both were busy for him; Miss Ellen supervised the woman who came to clean, while Miss Alison did the week’s shopping. They never had been so perky or useful in their lives before, and especially not since the eldest sister had died, who had always told them what to do with their spare time as it cropped up.

But the minister’s sister, gaunt Miss Gaunt, was secretly taking over the dead Sister’s office. As it became known later, Miss Gaunt approved of their arrangement with Gordon Lowther and encouraged them to make it a permanent one for their own good, and also for private reasons connected with Miss Brodie.

Up to now, Miss Brodie’s visits to Mr. Lowther had taken place on Sundays. She always went to church on Sunday mornings—she had a rota of different denominations and sects, which included the Free Church of Scotland, the Established Church of Scotland, the Methodist and the Episcopalian Churches, and any other church outside the Roman Catholic pale that she might discover. Her disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics. In some ways her attitude was a strange one, because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit—it might even have normalized her. But perhaps this was the reason that she shunned it, lover of Italy though she was, bringing to her support when the Catholic Church was in question a rigid Edinburgh-born side of herself not otherwise greatly in evidence. She was not in any doubt—she let everyone know she was in no doubt—that God was on her side whatever her course, and so she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy in worship while at the same time she went to bed with the singing master. Just as an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt.

The side effects of this condition were exhilarating to her special girls, in that they in some way partook of the general absolution she had assumed to herself, and it was only in retrospect that they could see Miss Brodie’s affair with Mr. Lowther for what it was—that is to say, in a factual light. All the time they were under her influence, she and her actions were outside the context of right and wrong. It was twenty-five years before Sandy had so far recovered from a creeping vision of disorder that she could look back and recognize that Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects—by which time Sandy had already betrayed Miss Brodie and Miss Brodie was laid in her grave.

It was after morning church on Sundays that Miss Brodie would go to Cramond, there to lunch and spend the afternoon with Mr. Lowther. She spent Sunday evening with him also, and, more often than not, the night, in a spirit of definite duty, if not exactly martyrdom, since her heart was with the renounced teacher of art. Mr. Lowther, with his long body and short legs, was a shy fellow, who smiled upon nearly everyone from beneath his red-gold mustache and who won his own gentle way with nearly everybody, and who said little and sang much. When it became certain that the Kerr Sisters had taken over permanently the housekeeping for this bashful, smiling bachelor, Miss Brodie fancied he was getting thin. She announced this discovery just at a time when Jenny and Sandy had noticed a slimmer appearance in Miss Brodie: and had begun to wonder, since they were nearly thirteen and their eyes were more focussed on such points, if she might be physically beautiful or desirable to men. They saw her in a new way, and decided she had a certain deep romantic beauty, and that she had lost weight through her sad passion for Mr. Lloyd and this noble undertaking of Mr. Lowther in his place, and that it suited her.

Now Miss Brodie was saying, “Mr. Lowther is looking thin these days. I have no faith in those Kerr sisters. They are skimping him—they have got skimpy minds. The supplies of food they leave behind on Saturdays are barely sufficient to see him through Sunday, let alone the remainder of the week. If only Mr. Lowther could be persuaded to move from that big house and take a flat in Edinburgh, he would be so much easier to look after. He needs looking after. But he will not be persuaded. It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.”

She decided to supervise the Kerr sisters on their Saturdays at Cramond when they prepared for Mr. Lowther’s domestic week ahead. “They get well paid for it,” said Miss Brodie. “I shall go over and see that they order the right stuff, and sufficient.” It might have seemed an audacious proposition, but the girls did not think of it this way. They heartily urged Miss Brodie to descend upon the Kerrs and to interfere, partly in anticipation of some eventful consequence and partly because they knew that Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together; she was the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, and they were only the squares of the other two sides.

The Kerr sisters took Miss Brodie’s intrusion quite meekly, and that they were so unquestioning about any authority that imposed itself upon them was the very reason they did not hesitate later on to answer the subsequent questions of Miss Gaunt. Meantime, Miss Brodie set about feeding Mr. Lowther up, and, since this meant her passing Saturday afternoons at Cramond, the Brodie set was invited to go—two by two, each pair every third week—to visit her in Mr. Lowther’s residence, where he smiled and patted their hair or pulled pretty Jenny’s ringlets, looking meanwhile for reproof or approval, or some such thing, at brown-eyed Jean Brodie. She gave them tea while he smiled, and he frequently laid down his cup and saucer, went and sat at the piano, and burst into song. He sang:“March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Why the de’il dinna ye march forward in order? March, march, Eskdale and Liddesdale, All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the Border.”

At the end of the song, he would smile his overcome and bashful smile and take up his teacup again, looking up under his ginger eyebrows at Jean Brodie to see what she felt about him at the current moment. Mr. Lowther never seemed quite at home in his home, although he had been born there. He always looked at Miss Brodie for approval before he touched anything or opened a cupboard, as if, really, he was not allowed to touch without permission.

Miss Brodie reported to Sandy and Jenny, “I made short work of those Kerr sisters. They were starving him. Now it is I who see to the provisions. I am a descendant, do not forget, of Willie Brodie, a man of substance, a cabinetmaker and designer of gibbets, a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh, and a keeper of two mistresses who bore him five children between them. Blood tells. He played much dice and fighting cocks. Eventually he was a wanted man for having robbed the Excise Office—not that he needed the money; he was a night burglar only for the sake of the danger in it. Of course, he was arrested abroad and was brought back to the Tolbooth prison, but that was mere chance. He died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising in 1788. However all this may be, it is the stuff I am made of, and I have brooked and shall brook no nonsense from Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr.” Mr. Lowther sang:“O mother, mother, make my bed, O make it soft and narrow, For my true love died for me today. I’ll die for him tomorrow.”

Then he looked at Miss Brodie.

She, however, was looking at the chipped rim of a teacup. “Mary Macgregor must have chipped it,” she said. “Mary was here last Sunday with Eunice, and they washed up together.”

Outside on the summer lawn the daisies sparkled. The lawn spread wide and long—one could barely see the little wood at the end of it, and even the wood belonged to Mr. Lowther, and the fields beyond. Shy, musical, and gentle as he was, Mr. Lowther was a man of substance.

Now Sandy considered Miss Brodie not only to see if she was desirable but also to find out if there was any element of surrender about her, since this was the most difficult part of the affair to realize. She had been a dominant presence rather than a physical woman like Norma Shearer or Elisabeth Bergner. Miss Brodie was now forty-three, and this year when she looked so much thinner her shape was pleasanter, but it was still fairly large compared with Mr. Lowther’s. He was slight, and he was shorter than Miss Brodie. He looked at her with love, and she looked at him severely and possessively.

By the end of the summer term, when the Brodie set were all turned, or nearly turned, thirteen, Miss Brodie questioned them in their visiting pairs each week about their art lesson. The girls always took a close interest in Teddy Lloyd’s art classes and in all he did, making much of details, so as to provide happy conversation with Miss Brodie when their turn came to visit her at Gordon Lowther’s house at Cramond.

It was a large, gabled house with a folly-turret. There were so many twists and turns in the wooded path leading up from the road, and the front lawn was so narrow, that the house could never be seen from the little distance that its size demanded, and it was necessary to crane one’s neck upward to see the turret at all. The rooms were large and gloomy, with Venetian blinds. The banisters began with a pail of carved lions’ heads and carried up and up, round and round, as far as the eye could reach. All the furniture was large and carved, dotted with ornaments of silver and rose-colored glass. The library, on the ground floor, where Miss Brodie entertained them, held a number of glass-fronted bookcases so dim in their interiors that it was impossible to see the titles of the books without peering close. A grand piano was placed across one corner of the room, and on it, in summer, stood a bowl of roses.

This was a great house to explore, and on days when Miss Brodie was curiously occupied in the kitchen with some enormous preparation for the next day’s eating—her obsession with Mr. Lowther’s food had just begun—the girls were free to roam up the big stairs, with awe, and to open the doors and look into the dust-sheeted bedrooms. On their descending the stairs after these expeditions, Mr. Lowther would often be standing waiting for them, shyly smiling in the hall with his hands clasped together, as if he hoped that everything was to their satisfaction. He took roses from the bowl and presented one each to the girls before they went home.

At tea, he sat silently and gratefully, watching Miss Brodie entertain the two girls whose turn it was to be there. She had already started on her project of fattening him up. One day when Sandy and Jenny were on the visiting list, she gave Mr. Lowther, for tea alone, an admirable lobster salad, some sandwiches of liver paste, cake, and tea, followed by a bowl of porridge and cream. These were served to him on a tray for himself alone, and you could see he was on a special diet. Sandy was anxious to see if Mr. Lowther would manage the porridge as well as everything else. He worked his way through everything with impassive obedience while she questioned the girls.

“What are you doing in the art class just now?”

“We’re at work on the poster competition.”

“Mr. Lloyd—is he well?”

“Oh, yes, he’s great fun. He showed us his studio two weeks ago.”

“Which studio, where? At his house?”—although Miss Brodie knew perfectly well.

“Yes, it’s a great long attic, it—”

“Did you meet his wife, what was she like? What did she say, did she give you tea? What are the children like, what did you do when you got there?”

Miss Brodie did not attempt to conceal from her munching host her keen interest in the art master. Mr. Lowther’s eyes looked mournful and he ate on. Sandy and Jenny knew that similar questions had been pressed upon Mary Macgregor and Eunice Gardiner the previous week, and upon Rose Stanley and Monica Douglas the week before. But Miss Brodie could not hear enough versions of the same story if it involved Teddy Lloyd, and now that the girls had been to his house—a large and shabby, a warm and unconventional establishment in the north of Edinburgh—Miss Brodie was thrown into a state of high excitement by every contact with these girls who had lately breathed Lloyd air.

“How many children?” asked Miss Brodie, her teapot poised.

“Five, I think,” said Sandy.

“Six, I think,” said Jenny, “counting the baby.”

“There are lots of babies,” said Sandy.

“Roman Catholics, of course,” said Miss Brodie, addressing this to Mr. Lowther.

“But the littlest baby,” said Jenny. “You’ve forgotten to count the wee baby. That makes six.”

Miss Brodie poured tea and cast a glance at Gordon Lowther’s plate. “Gordon,” she said, “a cake.”

He shook his head and said softly, as if soothing her, “Oh, no, no.”

“Yes, Gordon. It is full of goodness.” And she made him eat a Chester cake, and spoke to him in a slightly more Edinburgh way than usual, so as to make up to him by both means for the love she was giving to Teddy Lloyd instead of to him. “You must be fattened up, Gordon,” she said. “You must be two stone the better before I go on my holidays.”

He smiled as best he could at everyone in turn, with his drooped head and slowly moving jaws.

Meanwhile, Miss Brodie said, “And Mrs. Lloyd—Is she a woman, would you say, in her prime?”

“Perhaps not yet,” said Sandy.

“Well, Mrs. Lloyd may be past it,” Jenny said. “It’s difficult to say, with her hair being long on her shoulders. It makes her look young, although she may not be.”

“She looks really like as if she won’t have any prime,” Sandy said.

“The word ‘like’ is redundant in that sentence. What is Mrs. Lloyd’s Christian name?”

“Deirdre,” said Jenny, and Miss Brodie considered the name as if it were new to her, although she had heard it last week from Mary and Eunice and the week before that from Rose and Monica, and so had Mr. Lowther. Outside, light rain began to fall on Mr. Lowther’s leaves.

“Celtic,” said Miss Brodie.

Sandy loitered at the kitchen door, waiting for Miss Brodie to come for a walk by the sea.

Miss Brodie was doing something to an enormous ham prior to putting it into a huge pot. Miss Brodie’s new ventures into cookery in no way diminished her previous grandeur, for everything she prepared for Gordon Lowther seemed to be large, whether it was family-sized puddings to last him out the week, or joints of beef or lamb, or great angry-eyed whole salmon. “I must get this on for Mr. Lowther’s supper,” she said to Sandy, “and see that he gets his supper before I go home tonight.”

So far, she kept up the idea that she went home on these weekend nights and left Mr. Lowther alone in the big house. So far, the girls had found no evidence to the contrary, nor were they ever to do so. A little later, Miss Ellen Kerr was brought to the headmistress by Miss Gaunt to testify to having found Miss Brodie’s nightdress under a pillow of the double bed on which Mr. Lowther took his sleep. She had found it while changing the linen; it was the pillow on the far side of the bed, near the wall, under which the nightdress had been discovered, folded neatly.

“How do you know the nightdress was Miss Brodie’s?” demanded Miss Mackay, the sharp-minded woman, who smelled her prey very near and yet saw it very far. She stood with a hand on the back of her chair, bending forward, full of ears.

“One must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Gaunt.

“I am addressing Miss Ellen.”

“Yes, one must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Ellen, with her tight-drawn red-veined cheeks looking shiny and flustered. “It was crêpe de Chine.”

“It is non-proven,” said Miss Mackay, sitting down to her desk. “Come back to me,” she said, “if you have proof positive. What did you do with the garment? Did you confront Miss Brodie with it?”

“Oh, no, Miss Mackay,” said Miss Ellen.

“You should have confronted her with it. You should have said, ‘Miss Brodie, come here a minute, can you explain this?’ That’s what you should have said. Is the nightdress still there?”

“Oh, no, it’s gone.”

“She’s that brazen,” said Miss Gaunt.

All this was conveyed to Sandy by the headmistress herself at that subsequent time when Sandy looked at her distastefully through her little eyes and, evading the quite crude question that the coarse-faced woman asked her, was moved by various other considerations to betray Miss Brodie.

“But I must organize the dear fellow’s food before I go home tonight,” Miss Brodie said in the summer of 1933, while Sandy leaned against the kitchen door with her legs longing to be running along the seashore. Jenny came and joined her, and together they waited upon Miss Brodie, and saw on the vast old kitchen table the piled-up provisions of the morning’s shopping. At one side stood large bowls of fruit, with boxes of dates piled on top of them, as if this were Christmas and the kitchen that of a holiday hotel.

From the library came the sound of Mr. Lowther at the piano, singing rather slowly and mournfully:“All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice: Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell; Come ye before Him and rejoice.”

Mr. Lowther was the choirmaster and an elder of the church, and had not yet been quietly advised to withdraw from these offices by Mr. Gaunt, the minister, brother of Miss Gaunt, following the finding of the nightdress under the pillow next to his.

Presently, as she put the ham on a low gas and settled the lid on the pot, Miss Brodie joined in the psalm richly, giving the notes more body:“O enter, then, His gates with praise; Approach with joy His courts unto.”

The rain had stopped and was now only hanging damply within the salt air. All along the sea front Miss Brodie questioned the girls, against the rhythm of the waves, about the appointments of Teddy Lloyd’s house, the kind of tea they got, how vast and light was the studio, and what was said.

“He looked very romantic in his own studio,” Sandy said.

“How was that?”

“I think it was his having only one arm,” said Jenny.

“But he always has only one arm.”

“He did more than usual with it,” said Sandy.

“He was waving it about,” Jenny said. “There was a lovely view from the studio window. He’s proud of it.”

“The studio is in the attic, you said?”

“Yes, all along the top of the house. There is a new portrait he has done of his family—it’s a little bit amusing. It starts with himself, very tall, then his wife. Then all the little children graded downward to the baby on the floor; it makes a diagonal line across the canvas.”

“What makes it amusing?” said Miss Brodie

“That they are all facing square and they all look serious,” Sandy said. “You are supposed to laugh at it.”

Miss Brodie laughed a little at this. There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on everyday life.

“There’s another portrait,” Jenny said, “not finished yet, of Rose.”

“He has been painting Rose?”

“Yes.”

“Rose has been sitting for him?”

“Yes, for about a month.”

Miss Brodie was very excited. “Rose didn’t mention this,” she said.

Sandy halted. “Oh, I forgot. It was supposed to be a surprise. You aren’t supposed to know.”

“What—the portrait? I am to see it?”

Sandy looked confused, for she was not sure how Rose had meant her portrait to be a surprise to Miss Brodie.

Jenny said, “Oh, Miss Brodie, it is the fact that she’s sitting for Mr. Lloyd that she wanted to keep for a surprise.”

Sandy realized, then, that this was right.

“Ah,” said Miss Brodie, well pleased. “That is thoughtful of Rose.”

Sandy was jealous, because Rose was not supposed to be thoughtful.

“What is she wearing for her portrait?” asked Miss Brodie.

“Her gym tunic,” Sandy said.

“Sitting sidewise,” Jenny said.

“In profile,” said Miss Brodie. She stopped a man to buy a lobster for Mr. Lowther. When this was done, she said, “Rose is bound to be painted many times. She may well sit for Mr. Lloyd on future occasions; she is one of the crème de la crème.”

It was said in an inquiring tone. The girls understood she was trying quite hard to piece together a whole picture from their random remarks.

Jenny accordingly let fall, “Oh, yes, Mr. Lloyd wants to paint Rose in red velvet.”

And Sandy added, “Mrs. Lloyd has a bit of red velvet to put around her—they were trying it round her.”

“Are you to return?” asked Miss Brodie.

“Yes, all of us,” Sandy said. “Mr. Lloyd thinks we’re a jolly nice set.”

“Have you not thought it remarkable,” said Miss Brodie, “that it is you six girls that Mr. Lloyd has chosen to invite to his studio?”

“Well, we’re a set,” said Jenny.

“Has he invited any other girls from the school?” But Miss Brodie knew the answer.

“Oh, no, only us.”

“It is because you are mine,” said Miss Brodie. “I mean, of my stamp and cut, and I am in my prime.”

Sandy and Jenny had not given much thought to the fact of the art master’s inviting them as a group. Indeed, there was something special in his acceptance of the Brodie set. There was a thought here to be worked out, and it was clear that when he thought of them he thought of Miss Brodie.

“He always asks about you,” Sandy said to Miss Brodie, “as soon as he sees us.”

“Yes, Rose did tell me that,” said Miss Brodie.

Suddenly, like migrating birds, Sandy and Jenny were of one mind for a run, and without warning they ran along the pebbly beach into the air, which was full of sunset, returning to Miss Brodie to hear of her forthcoming summer holiday, when she was going to leave the fattened-up Mr. Lowther to fend for himself with the aid of the Misses Kerr, and was going abroad, not to Italy this year but to Germany, where Hitler was become Chancellor—a prophet figure like Thomas Carlyle, and more reliable than Mussolini. The German Brown Shirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian Black, only more reliable.

Jenny and Sandy were going to a farm for the summer, where the name of Miss Brodie would not very much be on their lips or in their minds after the first two weeks, and instead they would make hay and follow the sheep about. It was always difficult to realize during term times that the world of Miss Brodie might be half forgotten, as were the worlds of the school houses—Holyrood, Melrose, Argyll, and Biggar.

“I wonder if Mr. Lowther would care for sweetbreads done with rice,” Miss Brodie said.

Two years later, Miss Brodie said, “I wonder if Mr. Lloyd cares for Rose as a model.”

Sandy, when next she visited the Lloyds, stood with the couple before a canvas in the studio. “Why, it’s like Miss Brodie! It’s terribly like Miss Brodie.” Then, perceiving that her words had accumulated a meaning between their passing her lips and reaching the ears of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd, she said, “Though of course it’s Rose, it’s more like Rose, it’s terribly like Rose.”

Teddy Lloyd shifted the new portrait so that it stood in a different light. It still looked like Miss Brodie.

Deirdre Lloyd said, “I haven’t met Miss Brodie, I don’t think. Is she fair?”

“No,” said Teddy Lloyd in his hoarse way, “she’s dark.”

Sandy saw that the head on the portrait was fair—it was Rose’s portrait, all right. Rose was seated in profile by a window, in her gym dress, her hands palm downward, one on each knee. Where was the resemblance to Miss Brodie? It was the profile, perhaps; it was the forehead, perhaps; it was the type of stare from Rose’s blue eyes, perhaps, which was like the dominating stare from Miss Brodie’s brown. The portrait was very like Miss Brodie. “It’s Rose, all right,” Sandy said, and Deirdre Lloyd looked at her.

“Do you like it?” asked Teddy Lloyd.

“Yes, it’s lovely.”

“Well, that’s all that matters.”

Sandy continued looking at it through her very small eyes, and while she was doing so Teddy Lloyd drew the piece of sheeting over the portrait with a casual flip of his only arm.

Deirdre Lloyd was the first woman to dress up as a peasant whom Sandy had ever met. She wore a fairly long full-gathered dark skirt, a bright-green blouse with the sleeves rolled up, a necklace of large painted wooden beads, and gypsy-looking earrings. Round her waist was a bright-red wide belt. She wore dark-brown stockings and sandals of dark-green suède. In this, and various other costumes of similar kind, Deirdre was depicted on canvas in different parts of the studio. She had an attractive near-laughing voice. She said, “We’ve got a new one of Rose. Teddy, show Sandy the new one of Rose.”

“It isn’t quite at a stage for looking at.”

“Well, what about ‘Red Velvet’? Show Sandy that. Teddy did a splendid portrait of Rose last summer—we swathed her in red velvet, and we called it ‘Red Velvet.’ ”

Teddy Lloyd had brought out a canvas from behind a few others. He stood it in the light on an easel.

Sandy looked at it with her tiny eyes, which it was astonishing that anyone could trust. The portrait was like Miss Brodie. Sandy said, “I like the colors.”

“Does it resemble Miss Brodie?” asked Deirdre Lloyd with her near-laughter.

“Miss Brodie is a woman in her prime,” said Sandy, “but there is a resemblance, now you mention it.”

Deirdre Lloyd said, “Rose was only fourteen at the time. It makes her look very mature, but, of course, she is very mature.”

The swathing of crimson velvet was so arranged that it did two things at once; it made Rose look one-armed, like the artist himself, and it showed the curves of her breast to be more developed than they were, even now, when Rose was fifteen. Also, the picture was like Miss Brodie, and this was the main thing about it and the main mystery. Rose had a large-boned, pale face. Miss Brodie’s bones were small, although her eyes, nose, and mouth were large. It was difficult to see how Teddy Lloyd had imposed the dark and Roman face of Miss Brodie on that of pale Rose, but he had done so.

Sandy looked again at the other recent portraits in the studio—Teddy Lloyd’s wife, his children, some unknown sitters. They were none of them like Miss Brodie. Then she saw a drawing lying on top of a pile on the worktable. It was Miss Brodie leaning against a lamppost in the Lawnmarket, with a workingwoman’s shawl around her; on looking closer, it proved to be Monica Douglas with the high cheekbones and long nose. Sandy said, “I didn’t know Monica sat for you.”

“I’ve done one or two preliminary sketches. Don’t you think that setting’s rather good for Monica? Here’s one of Eunice in her harlequin outfit. I thought she looked rather well in it.”

Sandy was vexed. These girls, Monica and Eunice, had not said anything to the others about their being painted by the art master. But now they were all fifteen, there was a lot they did not tell each other. She looked more closely at this picture of Eunice. Eunice had worn the harlequin dress for a school performance. Small and neat and sharp-featured as she was, in the portrait she looked like Miss Brodie. In amongst her various bewilderments, Sandy was fascinated by the economy of Teddy Lloyd’s method, as she had been four years earlier by Miss Brodie’s variations on her love story, when she had attached to her first, wartime lover the attributes of the art master and the singing master, who had then newly entered her orbit. Teddy Lloyd’s method of presentation was similar. It was economical, and it always seemed afterward to Sandy that where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the best, and the course to be taken was the most expedient and most suitable at the time for all the objects in hand. She acted on this principle when the day came for her to betray Miss Brodie.

Jenny had done badly in her last term’s examinations and was mostly, these days, at home working up her subjects. Sandy had the definite feeling that the Brodie set—not to mention Miss Brodie herself—was getting out of hand. She thought it perhaps a good thing that the set might split up.

From somewhere below, one of the Lloyd children started to yell, and then another, and then a chorus. Deirdre Lloyd disappeared with a swing of her peasant skirt to see to all her children.

“One day,” said Teddy Lloyd as he stacked up his sketches before taking Sandy down to tea, “I would like to do all you Brodie girls, one by one and then all together.” He tossed his head to move back the golden lock of hair from off his eye. “It would be nice to do you all together,” he said, “and see what sort of a group portrait I could make of you.”

Sandy thought this might be an attempt to keep the Brodie set together at the expense of the newly glimpsed individuality of its members. She turned on him in her new manner of sudden irritability and said, “We’d look like one big Miss Brodie, I suppose.”

He laughed in a delighted way and looked at her more closely, as if for the first time. She looked back just as closely through her little eyes, with the near-blackmailing insolence of her knowledge. Whereupon he kissed her long and wetly. He said in his hoarse voice, “That’ll teach you to look at an artist like that.”

She started to run to the door, wiping her mouth dry with the back of her hand, but he caught her with his one arm and said, “There’s no need to run away. You’re just about the ugliest little thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He walked out and left her standing in the studio, and there was nothing for her to do but to follow him downstairs. Deirdre Lloyd’s voice called from the sitting room, “In here, Sandy.”

She spent most of the teatime trying to sort out her preliminary feelings, which was difficult because of the children who were present and making demands on the guest. The eldest boy, who was eight, turned on the wireless and began to sing in mincing English tones, “Oh, play to me, Gypsy,” to the accompaniment of Henry Hall’s band. The other three children were making various kinds of din. Above this noise, Deirdre Lloyd requested Sandy to call her Deirdre rather than Mrs. Lloyd. Sandy did not have much opportunity to discover how she was feeling inside herself about Teddy Lloyd’s kiss and his words, and to decide whether she was insulted or not. He now said, brazenly, “And you can call me Teddy outside of school.” Amongst themselves, in any case, the girls called him Teddy the Paint. Sandy looked from one to the other of the Lloyds.

“I’ve heard such a lot about Miss Brodie from the girls,” Deirdre was saying. “I really must ask her to tea. D’you think she’d like to come?”

“No,” said Teddy.

“Why?” said Deirdre—not that it seemed to matter, she was so languid and long-armed, lifting the plate of biscuits from the table and passing them around without moving from the low stool on which she sat.

“You kids stop that row or you leave the room!” Teddy roared.

“Bring Miss Brodie to tea,” Deirdre said to Sandy.

“She won’t come,” Teddy said. “Will she, Sandy?”

“She’s awfully busy,” Sandy said.

“Pass me a fag,” said Deirdre.

“Is she still looking after Lowther?” asked Teddy.

“Well, yes, a bit. . . .”

“Lowther,” said Teddy, waving his only arm, “must have a way with women. He’s got half the female staff of the school looking after him. Why doesn’t he employ a housekeeper? He’s got plenty of money, no wife, no kids, no rent to pay—it’s his own house.”

“I think he likes Miss Brodie,” Sandy said.

“But what does she see in him?”

“He sings to her,” said Sandy, suddenly sharp.

Deirdre laughed. “Miss Brodie sounds a bit queer, I must say. What age is she?”

“Jean Brodie,” said Teddy, “is a magnificent woman in her prime.” He got up, tossing back his lock of hair, and left the room. Deirdre blew a cloud of reflective smoke and stubbed out her cigarette, and Sandy said she would have to go now.

Mr. Lowther had caused Miss Brodie a good deal of worry in the past two years. There had been a time when it seemed he might be thinking of marrying Miss Alison Kerr, and another time when he seemed to favor Miss Ellen, all the while being in love with Miss Brodie herself, who refused him all but her bedfellowship and her catering. He tired of food, for it was making him fat and weary and putting him out of voice. He wanted a wife to play golf with and to sing to. He wanted a honeymoon on the Hebridean Island of Eigg, near Rum, and then to return to Cramond with the bride.

Still Miss Brodie refused him. After Ellen Kerr’s finding of a nightdress of quality folded under the pillow next to his, and his retirement from the offices of choirmaster and elder, he fell into melancholy mood, and the girls thought he brooded often upon the possibility that Miss Brodie would not take him and was all the time pining for Teddy Lloyd.

Most of this Miss Brodie had obliquely confided to the girls as they grew from thirteen to fourteen and from fourteen to fifteen. She did not say, even obliquely, that she slept with the singing master, for she was still testing them out to see whom she could trust. She did not want any alarming suspicions to arise in the minds of their parents—Miss Brodie was always very careful to impress the parents of her set and to win their approval and gratitude. So she confided according to what seemed expedient at the time, and was, in fact, now on the lookout for a girl amongst her set in whom she could confide entirely, whose curiosity was greater than her desire to make a sensation outside. Of necessity, there had to be but one girl; two would be dangerous. Almost shrewdly, Miss Brodie fixed on Sandy.

Miss Brodie started to confide in Sandy after the summer holidays of 1935. They played rounds of golf in the sunny early autumn after school. “All my ambitions,” said Miss Brodie, “are fixed on yourself and Rose. You will not speak of this to the other girls—it would cause envy. I had hopes of Jenny, she is so pretty, but Jenny has become insipid, don’t you think?”

This was a clever question, because it articulated what was already growing in Sandy’s mind. Jenny had bored her this last year, and it left her lonely.

“Don’t you think?” said Miss Brodie, towering above her, for Sandy was playing out of a bunker.

Sandy gave a hack with her niblick and said, “Yes, a bit,” sending the ball in a little backward half circle.

“And I had hopes of Eunice,” Miss Brodie said presently, “but she seems to be interested in some boy she goes swimming with.”

Sandy was not yet out of the bunker. It was sometimes difficult to follow Miss Brodie’s drift when she was in her prophetic moods. One had to wait and see what emerged. She glanced up at Miss Brodie, who was standing on the crest of the bunker, which was itself on a crest of the hilly course. Miss Brodie looked admirable in her heather-blue tweed, with the brown of a recent holiday in Egypt still warming her skin. Miss Brodie was gazing out over Edinburgh as she spoke.

Sandy got out of the bunker.

“Eunice,” said Miss Brodie, “will settle down and marry some professional man. Perhaps I have done her some good. Mary—well, Mary. I never had any hopes of Mary. I thought, when you were young children, that Mary might be something. She was a little pathetic. But she’s really a most irritating girl—I’d rather deal with a rogue than a fool. Monica will get her B.Sc. with honors, I’ve no doubt, but she has no spiritual insight, and of course that’s why she’s—”

They had moved to the next hole. Miss Brodie decided to stop talking until she had measured her distance and swiped her ball. Which she did. “That’s why she has a bad temper—she understands nothing but signs and symbols and calculations. Nothing infuriates people more than lack of spiritual insight, Sandy. That is why the Moslems are so placid—they are full of spiritual insight. My dragoman in Egypt would not have it that Friday was their Lord’s day. ‘Every day is the Lord’s day,’ he said to me. I thought that very profound. I felt humbled. We had already said our farewells on the day before my departure, Sandy, but, lo and behold, when I was already seated in the train, along the platform came my dragoman with a beautiful bunch of flowers for me. He had true dignity. Sandy, you will never get anywhere by hunching over your putter—hold your shoulders back and bend from the waist. He was a very splendid person, with a great sense of his bearing.”

They picked up their balls and walked to the next tee. “Have you ever played with Miss Lockhart?” Sandy said.

“Does she play golf?”

“Yes, rather well.” Sandy had met the science mistress, surprisingly, on the golf course one Saturday morning, playing with Gordon Lowther.

“Good shot, Sandy. I know very little of Miss Lockhart,” said Miss Brodie. “I leave her to her jars and gases. They are all gross materialists, these women in the Senior School. They all belong to the Fabian Society and are pacifists. That’s the sort of thing Mr. Lowther, Mr. Lloyd, and myself are up against when we are not up against the narrow-minded, half-educated crowd in the Junior departments. Sandy, I’ll swear you are shortsighted, the way you peer at people. You must get spectacles.”

“I’m not,” said Sandy irritably. “It only seems so.”

“It’s unnerving,” said Miss Brodie. “Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight—perhaps not quite spiritual, but you’re a deep one—and Rose has got instinct.”

“Perhaps not quite spiritual,” said Sandy.

“Yes,” said Miss Brodie, “you’re right. Rose has got a future by virtue of her instinct.”

“She has an instinct how to sit for her portrait,” said Sandy.

“That’s what I mean by your insight,” said Miss Brodie. “I ought to know, because my prime has brought me instinct and insight both.”

Fully to savor her position, Sandy would go and stand outside St. Giles’ Cathedral, or the Tolbooth, and contemplate these emblems of a dark and terrible salvation that made the fires of the damned seem very merry to the imagination by contrast, and much preferable. Nobody in her life—at home or at school—had ever spoken of Calvinism except as a joke that had once been taken seriously. In its outward forms, her fifteen years might have been spent in any suburb of any city in the British Isles; her school, with its alien house system, might have been in Ealing. All she was conscious of now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be, she felt deprived of it. In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived—or, rather, a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright, something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways, the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters, who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died; which was, indeed, but a mild understanding of the case, as Sandy found out later, when she read John Calvin, he having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless, she experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelled them in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime. Now that she was allowed to go about alone, she walked round the forbidden quarters of Edinburgh to look at the blackened monuments and hear the unbelievable curses of drunken men and women, and, comparing their faces with the faces from Morningside and Merchiston with which she was familiar, she saw, with stabs of new and exhilarating Calvinistic guilt, that there was not much difference. In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the making of Miss Brodie, who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink, like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more.

It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose, with her instinct, to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy, with her insight, to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea, which fascinated Sandy in her present mind. After all, it was only an idea. And there was no pressing hurry in the matter, for even if these plans were as clear to Miss Brodie’s own mind as they were to Sandy’s, the girls were too young. All the same, by the time the girls were sixteen Miss Brodie was saying to her set at large, “Sandy will make an excellent secret-service agent, a great spy,” and to Sandy alone she had started saying, “Rose will be a great lover. She is above the common moral code—it does not apply to her. This is a fact that it is not expedient for anyone to hear about who is not endowed with insight.”

For over a year, Sandy entered into the spirit of this plan, for she visited the Lloyds frequently and was able to report to Miss Brodie how things were going with the portraits of Rose, which so resembled Miss Brodie.

“Rose,” said Miss Brodie, “is like a heroine from a novel by D. H. Lawrence. She has got instinct.”

But in fact the art master’s interest in Rose was simply a professional one—she was a good model. Rose had an instinct to be satisfied with this role, and in the event it was Sandy who slept with Teddy Lloyd and Rose who carried back the information.

It was some time before these things came to pass, and meanwhile Miss Brodie was neglecting Mr. Lowther at Cramond and spending as much time as possible with Rose and Sandy discussing art, and then the question of sitting for an artist, and Rose’s future as a model, and the necessity for Rose to realize the power she had within her; it was a gift, and she an exception to all the rules—she was the exception that proved the rule. Miss Brodie was too cautious to be more precise, and Rose only half guessed at Miss Brodie’s meaning, for she was at this time, as Sandy knew, following her instinct and becoming famous for sex among the schoolboys who stood awkwardly with their bicycles at a safe distance from the school gates and among whom she was greatly popular, although she did not really talk about sex, far less indulge it. Rose did everything by instinct; she even listened to Miss Brodie as if she agreed with every word.

“When you are seventeen or eighteen, Rose, you will come to the moment of your great fulfillment.”

“Yes, honestly, I think so, Miss Brodie.”

During one summer term, Teddy Lloyd did the portraits of the various members of the Brodie set, and his passion for Jean Brodie was greatly in evidence. He did them in a group, wearing their panama hats each in a different way, each hat adorning, in a magical transfiguration, a different Jean Brodie under the forms of Rose, Sandy, Jenny, Mary, Monica, and Eunice. But mostly it was Rose who sat for him, because she was instinctively a good model and Teddy Lloyd paid her five shillings a sitting, which Rose found useful, being addicted to the cinema.

Sandy felt warmly toward Miss Brodie at these times when she saw how she was misled in her idea of Rose. It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way, Miss Brodie’s masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman’s folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie in her silly style.

But Miss Brodie as the leader of the set, Miss Brodie as a Roman matron, Miss Brodie as an educational reformer were still prominent. It was not always comfortable, from the school point of view, to be associated with her. The lack of team spirit alone, the fact that the Brodie set preferred golf to hockey or netball, were enough to set them apart, even if they had not dented in the crowns of their hats and tilted them backward or forward. It was impossible to escape from the Brodie set, because they were the Brodie set in the eyes of the school. Without this reputation, each of the six girls would have gone her own way by the time she was in the fourth form and had reached the age of sixteen.

But it was irrevocable, and they made the most of it, and saw that their position was really quite enviable. Everyone thought the Brodie set had more fun than anyone else, what with visits to Cramond, to Teddy Lloyd’s studio, to the theatre, and teas with Miss Brodie. And indeed it was so. And Miss Brodie was always a figure of glamorous activity, even in the eyes of the non-Brodie girls.

Miss Brodie’s struggles with the authorities on account of her educational system were increasing throughout the years, and she made it a moral duty for her set to rally round her each time her battle reached a crisis. Then she would find them, perhaps loitering with the bicycle boys after school, and they would be bidden to supper the following evening.

They went to the tramcar stop with her. “It has been suggested again that I should apply for a post at one of the progressive—that is to say, crank—schools. I shall not apply for a post at a crank school. I shall remain at this education factory, where my duty lies. There needs must be a leaven in the lump. The gang who oppose me shall not succeed.”

“No,” said everyone. “No, of course they won’t.”

“If they do not try to unseat me on the ground of my educational policy, they attempt personal calumny,” said Miss Brodie one day. “It is unfortunate, but true, that there have been implications against my character in regard to my relations with poor Mr. Lowther. As you girls well know, I have given much of my energy to Mr. Lowther’s health. I am fond of Mr. Lowther. Why not? Are we not bidden to love one another? I am Gordon Lowther’s closest friend, his confidante. I have neglected him of late, I am afraid, but still I have been all things to Gordon Lowther, and I need only lift my little finger and he would be at my side. This relationship has been distorted. . . .”

It was some months now that Miss Brodie had neglected the singing master, and the girls no longer spent Saturday afternoons at Cramond. Sandy assumed that the reason Miss Brodie had stopped sleeping with Gordon Lowther was that her sexual feelings were satisfied by anticipated proxy, and Rose was predestined to be the lover of Teddy Lloyd. “I have had much calumny to put up with on account of my good offices at Cramond,” said Miss Brodie. “However, I shall survive it. If I wished, I could marry him tomorrow.”

The morning after this saying, the engagement of Gordon Lowther to Miss Lockhart, the science teacher, was announced in the Scotsman. Nobody had expected it. Miss Brodie was greatly taken aback and suffered for a space from a sense of having been betrayed. But she seemed to recall herself to the fact that the true love of her life was Teddy Lloyd, whom she had renounced, and that Gordon Lowther had merely been useful. She subscribed with the rest of the school to the china tea set that was presented to the couple at the last assembly of the term. Mr. Lowther made a speech in which he called them “you girlies,” glancing shyly from time to time at Miss Brodie, who was watching the clouds through the window. Sometimes he looked toward his bride-to-be, who stood quietly by the side of the headmistress halfway up the hall, waiting till he should be finished and they could join him on the platform. He had confidence in Miss Lockhart, as everyone did; she not only played golf well and drove a car, she could also blow up the school with her jar of gunpowder and would never dream of doing so.

Miss Brodie’s brown eyes were fixed on the clouds. She looked quite beautiful and frail, and it occurred to Sandy that she had possibly renounced Teddy Lloyd only because she was aware that she could not keep up this beauty; it was a quality in her that came and went.

Next term, when Mr. Lowther returned from his honeymoon on the Island of Eigg, Miss Brodie put her spare energy into her plan for Sandy and Rose, with their insight and instinct, and what energy she had to spare from that she now put into political ideas.

Miss Mackay, the headmistress, never gave up pumping the Brodie set. She knew it was useless to do so directly; her approach was indirect, in the hope that they would be tricked into letting fall some piece of evidence that could be used to enforce Miss Brodie’s retirement. Once a term, the girls went to tea with Miss Mackay.

But, in any case, there was now very little they could say without implicating themselves. By the time their friendship with Miss Brodie was of seven years’ standing, it had worked itself into their bones, so that they could not break away without, as it were, splitting their bones to do so.

“You still keep up with Miss Brodie?” said Miss Mackay, with a gleaming smile. She had new teeth.

“Oh, yes, rather. . . .”

“Yes, oh, yes, from time to time. . . .”

Miss Mackay said to Sandy confidentially when her turn came round (because she treated the older girls as equals—which is to say, as equals definitely wearing school uniform), “Dear Miss Brodie, she sits on under the elm, telling her remarkable life story to the junior children. I mind when Miss Brodie first came to the school. She was a vigorous young teacher, but now. . .” She sighed and shook her head. She had a habit of putting the universal wise saws into Scots dialect to make them wiser. Now she said, “what canna be cured maun be endured. But I fear Miss Brodie is past her best. I doubt her class will get through its qualifying examination this year. But don’t think I’m criticizing Miss Brodie. She likes her wee drink, I’m sure. After all, it’s nobody’s business, so long as it doesn’t affect her work and you girls.”

“She doesn’t drink,” said Sandy, “except for sherry on her birthday—half a bottle between the seven of us.”

Miss Mackay could be observed mentally scoring drink off her list of things against Miss Brodie. “Oh, that’s all I meant,” said Miss Mackay.

The Brodie girls, now that they were seventeen, were able to detach Miss Brodie from her aspect of teacher. When they conferred amongst themselves on the subject, they had to admit, at last and without doubt, that she was really an exciting woman as a woman. Her eyes flashed, her nose arched proudly, her hair was still brown and coiled matriarchally at the nape of her neck. The singing master, well satisfied as he was with Miss Lockhart—now Mrs. Lowther and lost to the school—would glance at Miss Brodie from under his ginger eyebrows with shy admiration and memories whenever he saw her.

One of her greatest admirers was the new girl called Joyce Emily Hammond, who had been sent to Blaine as a last hope, having been obliged to withdraw from a range of expensive schools north and south of the border because of her alleged delinquency, which so far had not been revealed. She was brought to school in the morning by a chauffeur in a large black car, though she was obliged to make her own way home—she lived in a huge house with stables, in the near environs of Edinburgh. Joyce Emily’s parents, wealthy as they were, had begged for a trial period to elapse at the new school before investing in yet another set of school-uniform clothing for their daughter. So Joyce Emily still went about in dark green while the rest wore deep violet, and she boasted five sets of discarded colors hanging in her wardrobe at home.

In general, she was disapproved of—not only because of her green stockings and skirt, her shiny car and chauffeur, but because life was already exceedingly full. This was particularly true of the Brodie set, to which Joyce Emily most desired to attach herself, perceiving their individualism. They were all busy with outside interests. Eunice had a boy friend, with whom she practiced swimming and diving. Monica Douglas and Mary Macgregor went slum-visiting together, with bundles of groceries. Jenny was already showing her dramatic talent and was all the time rehearsing for something in the school dramatic society. Rose modelled for Teddy Lloyd, and Sandy occasionally joined her, and was watchful, and sometimes toyed with the idea of inducing Teddy Lloyd to kiss her again, just to see if it could be done by sheer looking at him insolently with her little eyes. In addition to these activities, the Brodie set were meeting Miss Brodie by twos and threes, and sometimes all together, after school. It was at this time, in 1937, that she was especially cultivating Rose, and questioning Sandy, and being answered as to the progress of the great love affair presently to take place between Rose and the art master.

So that they had no time to do much about a delinquent whose parents had dumped her on the school by their influence, even if she was apparently a delinquent in name only. Miss Brodie, however, found time to take Joyce Emily up. The Brodie girls slightly resented this, but were relieved that they were not obliged to share the girl’s company, and that Miss Brodie took her to tea and the theatre on her own.

One of Joyce Emily’s boasts was that her brother at Oxford had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War. This dark, rather mad girl wanted to go, too, and to wear a white blouse and black skirt and march with a gun. Nobody took this seriously. The Spanish Civil War was something going on outside in the newspapers, and once a month in the school debating society. Everyone, including Joyce Emily, was anti-Franco, if they were anything at all.

One day it was realized that Joyce Emily had not been at school for some days, and soon someone else was occupying her desk. No one knew why she had left, until, six weeks later, it was reported that she had run away to Spain and been killed in an accident when the train she was travelling in had been attacked. The school held an abbreviated form of remembrance service for her.

Only four remained of the Brodie set for the last year. Mary Macgregor had gone to be a shorthand typist, and Jenny had gone to a school of dramatic art. For those who stayed, it was hardly like being at school at all; there was so much free time, so many lectures and so much library research outside the school building for the sixth-form girls that it was just a matter of walking in and out. They were deferred to and consulted, and had the feeling that they could, if they wished, run the place.

Eunice was to do modern languages, although she changed her mind a year later and became a nurse. Monica was destined for science, Sandy for psychology. Rose had hung on, not for any functional reason but because her father thought she should get the best out of her education, even if she was only going to the art school later on, or, at the worst, become a model for artists or dress designers. Rose’s father played a big part in her life; he was a huge widower, as handsome in his masculine way as was Rose in her feminine, proudly professing himself a cobbler—that was to say, he now owned an extensive shoemaking business. Some years ago, on meeting Miss Brodie, he had immediately taken a hearty male interest in her, as so many men did, not thinking her to be ridiculous, as might have been expected; but she would have none of Mr. Stanley, for he was hardly what she would call a man of culture. She thought him rather carnal. The girls, however, had always guiltily liked Rose’s father. And Rose, instinctive as she undoubtedly was, followed her instinct so far as to take on his hardheaded and merry carnality, and made a good marriage soon after she left school. She shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog shakes pond water from its coat.

Miss Brodie was not to know that this would be, and meantime Rose was deservedly famous for sex and was much sought after by sixth-form schoolboys and first-year University students. And Miss Brodie said to Sandy, “From what you tell me, I should think that Rose and Teddy Lloyd will soon be lovers.”

All at once, Sandy realized that this was not all theory and a kind of Brodie game, in the way that so much of life was unreal talk—like the prospects of a war and other theories that people were putting about in the air like pigeons, and one said “Yes, of course, it’s inevitable.” Miss Brodie meant it. Sandy looked at her, and perceived that the woman was obsessed by the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with. There was nothing new to Sandy in the idea; it was the reality that was new. She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago, sitting under the elm tree, telling her first simple love story, and wondered to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.

During the year past, Sandy had continued seeing the Lloyds. She went shopping with Deirdre Lloyd and got herself a folk-weave skirt like Deirdre’s. She listened to their conversation, at the same time calculating their souls by signs and symbols, as was the habit in those days of young persons who had read books of psychology when listening to older persons who had not. Sometimes, on days when Rose was required to pose naked, Sandy sat with the painter and his model in the studio, silently watching the strange mutations of the flesh on the canvas as they represented an anonymous nude figure and at the same time resembled Miss Brodie. Sandy had become highly interested in the painter’s mind, so involved with Miss Brodie as it was, and not accounting her ridiculous.

“I am his Muse,” said Miss Brodie when Sandy told her how peculiarly all his portraits reflected her. She told her again and again, for Miss Brodie loved to hear it. “But I have renounced his love in order to dedicate my prime to the young girls in my care. I am his Muse, but Rose shall take my place.”

She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy; she thinks she is the God of Calvin—she sees the beginning and the end. And Sandy thought, too, The woman is an unconscious Lesbian. And many theories from the books of psychology categorized Miss Brodie but failed to obliterate her image from the canvases of one-armed Teddy Lloyd.

When Sandy was a nun, sooner or later one and the other of the Brodie set came to visit her, because it was something to do, and she had written her book of psychology, and everyone likes to visit a nun; it provides a spiritual sensation, a catharsis to go home with, especially if the nun clutches the bars of the grille. Rose came, now long since married to a successful businessman who varied in his line of business from canned goods to merchant banking. They fell to talking about Miss Brodie. “She talked a lot about dedication,” said Rose, “but she didn’t mean your sort of dedication. But don’t you think she was dedicated to her girls in a way?”

“Oh, yes, I think she was,” said Sandy.

“Why did she get the push?” said Rose. “Was it sex?”

“No, politics.”

“I didn’t know she bothered about politics.”

“It was only a sideline,” Sandy said, “but it served as an excuse.”

Monica Douglas came to visit Sandy because there was a crisis in her life. She had married a scientist, and in one of her fits of anger had thrown a live coal at his sister. Whereupon the scientist demanded a separation, once and for all.

“I’m not much good at that sort of problem,” said Sandy.

But Monica had not thought she would be able to help much, for she knew Sandy of old, and persons known of old can never be of much help. So they fell to talking of Miss Brodie. “Did she ever get Rose to sleep with Teddy Lloyd?” asked Monica.

“No,” said Sandy.

“Then it was a real renunciation, in a way,” said Monica.

“Yes, it was,” said Sandy. “After all, she was a woman in her prime.”

“You used to think her talk about renunciation was a joke,” said Monica.

“So did you,” said Sandy.

In the summer of 1938, after the last of the Brodie set had left Blaine, Miss Brodie went to Germany and Austria, while Sandy read psychology and went to the Lloyds’ to sit for her own portrait. Rose came and kept them company occasionally. When Deirdre Lloyd took the children into the country, Teddy had to stay on in Edinburgh because he was giving a summer course at the art school. Sandy continued to sit for her portrait twice a week, and sometimes Rose came and sometimes not.

One day when they were alone, Sandy told Teddy Lloyd that all his portraits—even that of the littlest Lloyd baby—were now turning out to be likenesses of Miss Brodie, and she gave him her insolent blackmailing stare. He kissed her as he had done three years before, when she was fifteen, and for the best part of five weeks of the summer they had a love affair in the empty house, only sometimes answering the door to Rose, and at other times letting the bell scream on.

During that time he painted a little, and she said, “You are still making me look like Jean Brodie.” So he started a new canvas, but it was the same again.

She said, “Why are you obsessed with that woman? Can’t you see she’s ridiculous?”

He said yes, he could see that Jean Brodie was ridiculous. He said would she kindly stop analyzing his mind; it was unnatural in a girl of eighteen.

Miss Brodie telephoned for Sandy to come to see her early in September. She had returned from Germany and Austria, which were now magnificently organized. After the war, Miss Brodie admitted to Sandy, as they sat in the Braid Hills Hotel, “Hitler was rather naughty,” but at this time she was full of her travels and quite sure the new regime would save the world. Sandy was bored; it did not seem necessary that the world should be saved, only that the poor people in the streets and slums of Edinburgh should be relieved. Miss Brodie said there would be no war. Sandy never had thought so anyway. Miss Brodie came to the point. “Rose tells me you have become his lover.”

“Yes. Does it matter which one of us it is?”

“Whatever possessed you?” said Miss Brodie in a very Scottish way, as if Sandy had given away a pound of marmalade to an English duke.

“He interests me,” said Sandy.

“Interests you, forsooth,” said Miss Brodie. “A girl with a mind, a girl with insight. He is a Roman Catholic, and I don’t see how you can have to do with a man who can’t think for himself. Rose was suitable. Rose has instinct but no insight.”

Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie in his paintings. “You have instinct,” Sandy told him, “but no insight, or you would see that the woman isn’t to be taken seriously.”

“I know she isn’t,” he said. “You are too analytical and irritable for your age.”

The family had returned, and their meetings were dangerous and exciting. The more she discovered him to be still in love with Jean Brodie, the more Sandy was curious about the mind that loved the woman. By the end of the year, it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion, as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time.

But that autumn, while she was still probing the mind that invented Miss Brodie on canvas after canvas, Sandy met Miss Brodie several times.

Miss Brodie was at first merely resigned to Sandy’s liaison with the art master. Presently she was exultant, and presently again inquired for details, which she did not get. “His portraits still resemble me?” asked Miss Brodie.

“Yes, very much,” said Sandy.

“Then all is well,” said Miss Brodie. “And after all, Sandy,” she said, “you are destined to be the great lover, although I would not have thought it. Truth is stranger than fiction. I wanted Rose for him, I admit, and sometimes I regretted urging young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco. She would have done admirably for him, a girl of instinct, a—”

“Did she go to fight for Franco?” said Sandy.

“That was the intention. I made her see sense. However she didn’t have the chance to fight at all, poor girl.”

When Sandy returned, as was expected of her, to see Miss Mackay that autumn, the headmistress said to this rather difficult old girl with the abnormally small eyes, “You’ll have been seeing something of Miss Brodie, I hope. You aren’t forgetting your old friends, I hope.”

“I’ve seen her once or twice,” said Sandy.

“I’m afraid she put ideas into your young heads,” said Miss Mackay with a knowing twinkle, which meant that now Sandy had left school it would be all right to talk openly about Miss Brodie’s goings on.

“Yes, lots of ideas,” Sandy said.

“I wish I knew what some of them were,” said Miss Mackay, slumping a little and genuinely worried. “Because it is still going on, I mean class after class, and now she has formed a new set, and they are so out of key with the rest of the school—Miss Brodie’s set. They are precocious. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Sandy. “But you won’t be able to pin her down on sex. Have you thought of politics?”

Miss Mackay turned her chair so that it was nearly square with Sandy’s. This was business. “My dear,” she said, “what do you mean? I didn’t know she was attracted by politics.”

“Neither she is,” said Sandy, “except as a side interest. She’s a born Fascist—have you thought of that?”

“I shall question her pupils on those lines and see what emerges, if that is what you advise, Sandy. I had no idea you felt so seriously about the state of world affairs, Sandy, and I’m more than delighted—”

“I’m not really interested in world affairs,” said Sandy. “Only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie.”

It was clear the headmistress thought this rather unpleasant of Sandy. But she did not fail to say to Miss Brodie, when the time came, “It was one of your own girls who gave me the tip, one of your set, Miss Brodie.”

Sandy was to leave Edinburgh at the end of the year, and when she said goodbye to the Lloyds, she looked round the studio at the canvases on which she had failed to put a stop to Miss Brodie. She congratulated Teddy Lloyd on the economy of his method. He congratulated her on the economy of hers, and Deirdre looked to see what ever did he mean? Sandy thought, If he knew about my stopping of Miss Brodie he would think me more economical still. She was more fuming now with Christian morals than John Knox.

Miss Brodie was forced to retire at the end of the summer term of 1939, on the ground that she had been teaching Fascism. Sandy, when she heard of it, thought of the marching troops of Black shirts in the pictures on the wall. By now she had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.

Miss Brodie wrote to tell Sandy the news of her retirement:Of course this political question was only an excuse. They tried to prove personal immorality against me on many occasions and failed. My girls were always reticent on these matters. It was my educational policy they were up against, which had reached its perfection in my prime. I was dedicated to my girls, as you know. But they used this political excuse as a weapon. What hurts and amazes me most of all is the fact that, if Miss Mackay is to be believed, it was one of my own set who betrayed me and put the inquiry in motion. You will be astonished. I can write to you of this, because you of all my set are exempt from suspicion, you had no reason to betray me. I think first of Mary Macgregor. Perhaps Mary has nursed a grievance, in her stupidity of mind, against me—she is such an exasperating young woman. I think of Rose. It may be that Rose resented my coming first with Mr. L. Eunice—I cannot think it could be Eunice, but I did frequently have to come down firmly on her commonplace ideas. She wanted to be a Girl Guide, you remember. She was attracted to Team Spirit—could it be that Eunice bore a grudge? Then there is Jenny. Now, you know Jenny, how she went off and was never the same after she wanted to be an actress. She became so dull. Do you think she minded my telling her that she would never be a Fay Compton, far less a Sybil Thorndike? Finally, there is Monica. I half incline to suspect Monica. There is very little Soul behind the mathematical brain, and it may be that, in a fit of rage against that Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which was beyond her grasp, she turned and betrayed me. 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, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone. It was always in summertime 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,” Jenny 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,” said Sandy, “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 inquiring 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.”

Published in the print edition of the October 14, 1961, issue, with the headline “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

Maggie Smith’s portrayal of Miss Brodie continues to teach us

When actor Maggie Smith died in late September, the media highlighted memorable clips from her long screen career.

The witty dowager, the professor of sorcery, glimpses of Shakespearean scenes.

No role seemed to be featured more than her Oscar-winning performance in the film adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

That 1961 book became a popular play, adapted by Jay Presson Allen; it was a hit in London and New York.

The film version, directed by Ronald Neame, was released in 1969.

I first read the novel 30 years ago.

Not yet in my prime, I was unpublished, reading to study and learn craft.

The thing I remembered most about Spark’s book is the way it handles point of view and time — flashing forward thrillingly now and then in order to reveal the long-term effects of a charismatic teacher on her students.

The point-of-view trick is unique to the novel, something even the magic and money of filmmaking couldn’t achieve.

In the wake of Dame Maggie’s death, the film clip I’ve seen most often is the one in which Miss Brodie defends herself to her headmistress, who is intent on getting rid of her.

Miss Brodie protests, “I am a teacher, first, last, always!”

Eyes flashing, voice trembling, she sounds here like the patron saint of teachers: noble, defiant, the victim of uncaring school administrators.

That’s not the story I remember.

But the clip played so often I began to wonder if I’d missed the point completely when I read it.

Totally possible!

So I found a copy of the book and reread it.

(It’s super short. The entire novel was first published in an issue of The New Yorker.)

Thirty years later, the book dazzled me again.

And it was a relief to see I remembered the story accurately.

Miss Brodie is not a talented, dedicated or virtuous teacher.

She’s a narcissist, demanding her students’ unwavering attention — on her.

She is, after all, in her “prime.”

She soon becomes an object of fascination among her students, in part because she avoids dreary textbook subjects and lectures her students instead on topics she prefers, things such as skincare, school gossip and her own tragic love life.

Many of us have known a teacher like that, haven’t we?

The one we knew we could distract from the lesson with the right personal question?

We loved those teachers.

But what does it mean when a teacher is not actually teaching?

When education is disrupted and the class is held captive by a charismatic narcissist, who or what does that benefit?

The novel is set in 1930s Scotland, and Miss Brodie’s occasional praise of Benito Mussolini’s work in Italy — “They are doing splendid things, I shall tell you later” — passes by without her students having any clue what she is talking about.

They’re too busy, anyway, writing top-secret fan fiction about Miss Brodie’s imagined romance with a male teacher on staff.

Miss Brodie is supremely confident (one might even say authoritative), a quality that impresses and even inspires her girls.

She assures them that because they are in her classroom, listening to her wisdom, they are the best: “the crème de la crème.”

In one scene, Miss Brodie directs their attention to a poster on a wall, a portrait of United Kingdom Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with the slogan “Safety First.”

Not so, Miss Brodie informs the girls gravely.

“Goodness, truth and beauty come first. Follow me.”

Later, she asks a student to give her the name of the greatest Italian painter.

When the child answers Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie corrects her: “The answer is Giotto. He is my favorite.”

Quite often, we discover, Miss Brodie mistakes her opinions for facts.

Flash-forward to the present.

Wild, isn’t it, how familiar Miss Brodie feels to us now?

Her favorite subject, “first, last, always,” is herself.

She routinely mistakes her opinions for facts.

She complains constantly about enemies who plot against her, and she rallies her troops, uneducated and vulnerable, for support.

The novel makes us laugh, at first.

The words that come out of Miss Brodie’s mouth may be hilarious, ridiculous.

But as the story suggests, the years during which she stands before her students — her term of leadership and power — will prove to have dangerous, even deadly consequences.

Sixty-three years after it was published, Spark’s slim masterpiece may be one of the most relevant books of 2024.

I only hope a lot more than half the class is paying attention.

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