One of the sharpest and most effective is directed toward giving a kind of thumbnail or snapshot of Mary Macgregor, a girl who seems both part of and not quite part of the Miss Jean’s girls. She is not calling her a mermaid, although that particular allusion would actually not be entirely inappropriate:Įarly on in the novel, similes are used extensively to give a quick sketch of the personalities or quirks of the girls making up the Brodie set. When Eunice begins doing cartwheels (which Miss Jean has deemed a sacrilege of sorts when performed on Sundays, she refers to the girl through a metaphorical allusion recalling a airy spirit from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

Of course, one can make an allusive metaphor to an obscure figure, but it rather defeats the purpose. “One’s prime is the moment one was born for.” The Allusive MetaphorĪn allusive metaphor is one in which the figurative comparison is made directly (rather than through the simile’s use of “as” or “like”) to a figure relatively famous enough that it would not be considered obscure. Just in case anyone was wondering, in the words of Miss Jean Brodie herself: One could conceivably make a strong argument that there is another more significant use of metaphor in the novel, but it is quite unlikely. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Main image: Muriel Spark (1918 - 2006) (1960 Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Philip Dodd is joined by novelists Ian Rankin, Louise Welsh and former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway to examine this acclaimed and disturbing portrait of adolescent trauma and lost innocence.

However, her passionate relationship with her pupils gradually deteriorates from the eccentric and enriching, to the damaging and politically vicious. When she decides to transform a group of young pupils into the crème de la crème of Marcia Blaine school, 'the Brodie Set' feel honoured and privileged - but in return she expects their undivided loyalty: 'give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life'. She's a dangerously confused woman, headstrong and left single by the holocaust of young men in the First World War, and forced to work out her frustrations as a teacher in a conventional Edinburgh school for girls. Its heroine Jean Brodie, is a schoolmistress with a difference - proud, cultured and romantic, her ideas are progressive and radical.

Philip Dodd presents a Landmark edition examining Muriel Spark's 1961 novel The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie It's a fierce assault on the smug, joyless and sexless quality of Edinburgh middle-class life in the 1930s.

The prime of miss