Miss Jean Brodie, the schoolteacher created by novelist Muriel Spark, has become an immortal literary character. Spark, who was born in 1918, went to Gillespie’s School for Girls in Edinburgh. Even at that age she was known as the school’s ‘poet and dreamer’. She went on to become one of the finest writers of her generation, living most of her life away from Scotland, in Africa, London, New York, Rome and latterly Tuscany. She never, however, forgot her homeland, or the influence it exerted on her writing and her imagination. Here she describes the origins of her beloved but sinister schoolmistress.
The walls of our classrooms had hitherto been covered with our own paintings and drawings, records of travels, pages from the National Geographic, portraits of exotic animals and birds. But now I come to Miss Christina Kay, that character in search of an author, whose classroom walls were adorned with reproductions of early and Renaissance paintings, Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli. She borrowed these from the senior art department, run by handsome Arthur Couling. We had the Dutch masters and Corot. Also displayed was a newspaper cutting of Mussolini’s Fascisti marching along the streets of Rome.
I fell into Miss Kay’s hands at the age of eleven. It might well be said that she fell into my hands. Little did she know, little did I know, that she bore within her the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie, the main character in my novel, in a play on the West End of London and on Broadway, in a film and a television series.
I do not know exactly why I chose the name Miss Brodie. But recently I learned that Charlotte Rule, that young American woman who taught me to read when I was three, had been a Miss Brodie and a schoolteacher before her marriage. Could I have heard this fact and recorded it unconsciously?
In a sense Miss Kay was nothing like Miss Brodie. In another sense she was far above and beyond her Brodie counterpart. If she could have met ‘Miss Brodie’ Miss Kay would have put the fictional character firmly in her place. And yet no pupil of Miss Kay’s has failed to recognize her, with joy and great nostalgia, in the shape of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.
She entered my imagination immediately. I started to write about her even then. Her accounts of her travels were gripping, fantastic. Besides turning in my usual essays about how I spent my holidays, I wrote poems about how she had spent her various holidays (in Rome, for example, or Egypt, or Switzerland). I thought her experiences more interesting than mine, and she loved it. Frances [Niven], too, fell entirely under her spell. In fact, we all did, as is testified by the numerous letters I have received from time to time from Miss Kay’s former pupils.
I had always enjoyed watching teachers. We had a large class of about forty girls. A full classroom that size, with a sole performer on stage before an audience sitting in rows looking and listening, is essentially theatre.
From my first days at school I had been far more interested in the looks, the clothes, the gestures, of the individual teachers than I was in their lessons. With Miss Kay, I was fascinated by both. She was the ideal dramatic instructor, and it is not surprising that her reincarnation, Miss Brodie, has always been known as a ‘good vehicle for an actress’.
It was not that Miss Kay overacted; indeed, she never acted at all. She was a devout Christian, deeply versed in the Bible. There could have been no question of a love-affair with the art master, or a sex-affair with the singing master, as in Miss Brodie’s life. But children are quick to perceive possibilities, potentialities: in a remark, perhaps in some remote context; in a glance, a smile. No, Miss Kay was not literally Miss Brodie, but I think Miss Kay had it in her, unrealized, to be the character I invented.
Years and years later, some time after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Frances Niven (now Frances Cowell), my dear best friend of those days, observed in a letter:
Surely 75% is Miss Kay? Dear Miss Kay! of the cropped iron grey hair with fringe (and heavy black moustache!) and undisputable admiration for Il Duce. Hers was the expression ‘cre`me de la cre`me’ – hers the revealing extra lessons on art and music that stay with me yet. She it was who took us both (who were especial favourites of hers –? – part of the as yet unborn Brodie Set) to see Pavlova’s last performance at the Empire Theatre. Who took us for afternoon teas at McVities.