56 pages • 1 hour read
Muriel SparkThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark (née Camberg) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1918. Her father, who was descended from Lithuanian immigrants, was Jewish, and her mother was English and Anglican. From 1923 to 1935, she attended James Gillespie’s School for Girls, during which time she was taught by Miss Christina Kay, who would become the inspiration for Jean Brodie. She briefly attended Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, studying writing and commercial correspondence, before working as an English teacher and a saleswoman in a department store. In 1937, she married Sidney Oswald Spark—who was 13 years her senior—and traveled with him to Zimbabwe, where he was working as a teacher. Their son Robin was born in 1938. Spark divorced her husband in 1940 after learning that his bipolar disorder led to violent outbursts. She placed Robin in a convent school, where he remained through the end of World War II, and their relationship eventually became strained and distant.
Spark began writing poetry and literary criticism after the war, becoming the editor of the Poetry Review in 1947 and founding her own literary magazine, Forum, in 1949. She was known for her editorial adventurousness and willingness to publish works by new poets. Her first short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” was published in 1951, and her first collection of poetry appeared in 1952. Spark converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954, which she claimed was crucial to her development as a fiction writer. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published to great acclaim in 1957; in 1961, it was followed by the even more lauded The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After brief stints in London, New York City, and Rome, Spark settled in a small village in Tuscany, where she lived with sculptor Penelope Jardine for the rest of her life. Over the next four decades, she continued writing popular novels and literary criticism, ultimately becoming a household name in Britain. Her work was notable for bringing together different literary traditions and styles, including social satire, Gothic romance, psychological thrillers, and comedies of manners. In 2006, Spark died and was buried in Tuscany, leaving her entire estate to Jardine.
Sociohistorical Context: The Rise of Fascism in Europe
The political ideology known as fascism was born in Italy after the end of World War I (1914-1918). It was developed by Giovanni Gentile, a politician and educator, and Benito Mussolini, who founded Italy’s National Fascist Party in 1921 and served as the country’s Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943. Italian fascism was rooted in the belief that certain treaties signed at the end of the war had cheated Italy out of its territories and led to a series of post-war economic and political crises. Mussolini and his followers believed that modern Italy was the heir to both ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance, and as such, it should create an Italian empire in the Mediterranean that would be open to colonization by Italian settlers. Italian fascists opposed political and philosophical liberalism, or the belief that each citizen has an inherent right to freedom and equality before the law. Mussolini believed that an emphasis on individualism would lead to social decay and argued that in an ideal fascist nation, principles of totalitarianism would lead to the erasure of individualism and the incorporation of all parts of life into the state. Fascists were also socially conservative, discouraging women from voting or working outside the home and arguing that identities they perceived as sexually deviant—including those of queer and trans people—should be illegal.
While openly anti-intellectual, Italian fascism used art and architecture to create a political or civic religion that mimicked actual religion; in other words, fascists created their own political myths, stories that were not necessarily true in a literal sense, but which inspired adherents of fascism to become even more devoted to the movement. Germany’s Nazi party later adopted and expanded these techniques of propaganda and social control.
Italian fascists did not initially align themselves with the German Nazi party, which was founded in 1920, because they did not promote antisemitism or Nordicism (the belief that white people of Scandinavian heritage are an inherently superior race). However, by the late 1930s, Mussolini’s government began to discriminate against racial minorities, partially in deference to Nazi Germany. This included a strict segregation of between white and Black people in Ethiopia, which Italy had been attempting to colonize since the late 19th century. Despite its ultimate failure—culminating in the 1945 assassination of Mussolini—Italian fascism’s model influenced a number of other fascist groups, such as those in Nazi Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
