The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Teaching girls to claim them as your own
Jean Brodie is in her prime, and she will not compromise on how she spends these best years of her life. Working as a junior-school teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, she is equal parts devotion and domination for her select students. Miss Jean Brodie defies convention and curriculum, but in 1930s Britain such defiance comes at a price.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a modern stage adaptation by David Harrower of the classic 1961 novel by Muriel Spark, which was immortalised by Maggie Smith’s portrayal of the eponymous Miss Brodie in the 1969 film adaptation. The new 2026 adaptation strips the source material back to the essentials to reveal an imperious yet sympathetic Miss Brodie, played by a terrific Gayle Rankin, whose unrepentant hubris powers this modern version of a classic tragedy.
Each year, Miss Jean Brodie leads a class of girls through their final junior year at Marcia Blaine School for Girls. From each class, she selects her ‘set’; those girls in which she discerns the highest potential for future greatness. Miss Brodie’s pedagogy is unconventional and uninhibited. She gives everything for her girls, but also expects complete devotion in return. Her unorthodox teaching methods and flagrant disregard for prevailing norms place her in constant uneasy tension with Miss Mackay, the head teacher, whose sole concern is to produce respectful and obedient girls who are ready to take their allotted place in society. Miss Jean Brodie despises such conformism, and exhorts her girls to reach for greatness, the strictures of 1930s’ Britain notwithstanding, though not always from the purest of motives.
For this theatre production, a dramatic stage is set with a single amphitheatre acting as classroom, schoolyard, lounge and more, the semicircular shape reflecting the geometry of the theatre back at the audience. Crowned by an enormous modernist chandelier and enclosed by projections of famous artworks or stylised images of Brodie’s girls, the entire setup is combined with intense electronic dance music to produce dramatic scene changes that express the ecstatic bond between Miss Brodie and her disciples.
At the start of the play, Joyce Emily and Sandy are newly introduced to Miss Brodie’s class, and the intellectual Sandy immediately draws the her teacher’s attention. Initially put off by Miss Brodie’s distate for her studiousness, Sandy is nonetheless swayed by the attention Miss Brodie lavishes on her chosen few. She quickly becomes one of her most devoted acolytes, neglecting her erstwhile friend Joyce Emily, and instead sharing her worship of Miss Brodie with Mary, Monica and Jenny, the other members of this year’s set. For Miss Brodie represents everything an 11-year old girl might aspire to be. She is graceful, travelled, and independent, with a quick and acerbic wit. Male teachers Lloyd and Lowther are evidently infatuated with her, adding an extra element of frisson.
Through Miss Brodie her girls get a glimpse of a glorious and glamorous adulthood, but this vicariousness is reciprocal, and that is where the darker side of Miss Brodie’s investment in her set emerges. For all her towering strength of will, her appreciation of the fine arts, and her adoration of the Italian fascists, Miss Jean Brodie is ultimately stuck in a dead-end teaching job in dreary Scotland. She is caught between the advances of the well-meaning but boring music teacher, and her attraction to the exciting but unavailable (because married) art teacher. Her own existence defies her core belief that a woman can achieve anything she wants with sheer willpower and ambition alone. And so she sends her girls out into the world to attain the successes that are out of her own reach, claiming the reflected glory as her own. Except that on contact with 1930s reality, almost all of her girls duly and catastrophically fail, only for them to be rejected and replaced by a new set of Miss Brodie’s hopefuls.
Jean Brodie has an Ayn Randian faith in the heroic individualism of the creative spirit, but her disdain for such collective endeavours as ‘teamwork’ and communism blinds her to the fact that the structural constraints of patriarchy can only be thrown off through collective, rather than individual efforts. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the irony in her adoration of the futurist modernism of the fascists, given their later propensity to relegate women to the role of breeding machines for the fatherland. She shares with Castlevania’s Carmilla and Butter’s Manako Kajii the tragic fate of women who go up against the patriarchy alone, only to discover that no amount of individual power can defeat it. One can wonder what lessons Miss Jean Brodie might have imparted to her girls if instead of Benito Mussolini her inspiration had been Alexandra Kollontai.
To paraphrase Erasmus: to be a schoolmaster is next to being a queen, and Miss Brodie certainly feels entitled to the achievements of her ‘subjects’. Gayle Rankin’s portrayal of a conflicted, ambiguous and profoundly tragic Jean Brodie is a tour de force. Miss Brodie’s ultimate betrayal by precisely her most successful student, a Sandy brilliantly played by Bobby Rainsbury, only emphasises the intrinsic tragedy of her subconscious hypocrisy.
Jean Brodie’s defeat at the hands of the patriarchy was always inevitable, but the real hubris that sealed her fate was not her belief that anything can be overcome by force of will, but her conviction that by lavishing love on her girls, she could claim their futures as her own. To quote another woman who was fiercely independent, proud, unflinchingly loyal, but not blind to the true nature of things, here are the words of the indomitable Esme Weatherwax:
There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things, including yourself. That’s what sin is.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is as topical in 2026 as it was in 1961. In times of girlboss feminism, hustle culture and the ineradicable neoliberal injunction that we are all entrepreneurs of the self, its searing but sympathetic critique of the faith in heroic individualism resonates as strongly as it ever did. Our way forward is to realise, as some of Miss Brodie’s girls eventually do, that true power lies in mutual aid, care, and indeed, the dreaded teamwork. No woman is an island, after all.
Notes & Suggestions
- The Esme Weatherwax quote is from Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum, in an exchange with Mightily Oats, priest of Om. Page 314 of the Corgi paperback edition, to be precise.
- Going the other way from Jean Brodie’s heroic individualism is Jodi Dean’s subsuming collectivism as proposed in Comrade. Whether we can engender a collective spirit that enhances rather than suppresses individual self-realisation is truly the question for our times.
- Almost 100 years from the time that Miss Brodie taught her girls that anything was possible if only they set their minds to it, women still find themselves oppressed by misogyny, discrimination, (sexual) violence, and a pernicious narrative that they are the weaker sex. To build a world of gender equality, we must reject Jean Brodie’s dismissal of teamwork, and instead come together in campaign groups, political parties, trade unions and other collective endeavours to dismantle the patriarchy.
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