by Don Wilms:
Don Wilms led the RVA ((Richmond, Virginia) Classic Book Club Discussion of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.
The title character in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was, on the surface, based on a teacher in whose class Spark was a pupil for two years, starting when she was eleven years old. Miss Christina Kay was a respected teacher who encouraged her students along their chosen paths. It seems, however, that besides the inspiration of her former teacher, Miss Jean Brodie is drawn from Spark’s own interesting life.
While Christina Kay did indeed hang posters of Renaissance art as well as of Mussolini on her classroom walls, she took care of her aging mother, not the music teacher. But Spark’s own mother was a music teacher like Gordon Lowther, and here lies one of many subtle influences from Spark’s life that infiltrate the novel.
When Spark returned to Britain after her divorce, leaving her son in the care of a convent school, she lived as a single woman at London’s Helena Club, the name of which in her most famous novel becomes part of Sandy’s chosen appellation, Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, when Sandy enters the convent. It is perhaps while living in this location that Spark transfigures into the type of character she would one day incorporate into The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
While it is true that Jean Brodie did not like the Catholic faith—“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”—and Muriel Spark was a convert to Catholicism, Spark’s narrator also says about Jean Brodie, “…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 normalised (emphasis mine) her” (Ch. 4).
Before she began writing novels, Spark had a crisis of faith, becoming influenced by the writings of Anglican-turned-Catholic John Henry Newman. Spark joined the Church of England first, then quickly converted to Catholicism. Her conversion affected her life and her writing (Turner, Jenny. “Dame Muriel Spark.” The Guardian, 17 May 2006). Spark said her conversion to Catholicism “provided my norm (emphasis mine). . . [gave me] something to measure from”; another writer said that Spark “has pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic . . . that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do” (Hagar, Hal. “Meet Muriel Spark.” The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999).
Jean Brodie is perhaps the unnormalized version of the novelist. Yet, in other ways, Muriel Spark became a normalized Jean Brodie in the years subsequent to writing the novel. Shortly after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie established her fame, Spark fled Britain, moving first to New York, then subsequently to Italy, where she lived for the rest of her long life. Italy was, of course, one of Miss Brodie’s favorite places. In Italy, Spark lived for a while across the street from the Vatican, the home of the Church she made her own and the same one that might have “normalised” Jean Brodie. But ultimately, she spent most of her Italian years in Tuscany, the home of Giotto, the best Italian painter, who is Miss Brodie’s favorite.
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