Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished George Gissing's The Odd Women, but my remarks about it got so long that I'm making them a separate post.

I also read Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (it's actually quite short, which surprised me), and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher of unorthodox methods at a girls' school in 1930s Edinburgh, who often tells her pupils to get out their history books just in case someone comes in and then regales them with stories of her youthful love affairs or her latest vacation to Italy, where she so admired the blackshirts.

She gathers around her six pupils who are her "set" - she invites them to teas and museum and the theater and so forth. But in the end, one of her own girls betrays her to the headmistress, at last giving her the ammunition that she has long desired to fire this troublesome teacher.



The thing that bothers me is that this betrayal seems oddly unmotivated, and not for lack of possible motives. Sandy could have been angry that Miss Brodie sort of maneuvered her into a love affair with the art master, whom Miss Brodie loved herself but renounced because he was married. She might have been genuinely disturbed by Miss Brodie's increasingly pro-fascist sentiments (the book ends in 1939). Or maybe she was appalled by Miss Brodie's casual admission that she encouraged another student's plans to go to Spain to fight for Franco, which ended in that student's death.

The juxtaposition of events suggests that it was this last that tipped her over... but it feels weird that the betrayer herself (whose POV we inhabit when the betrayal happens!) never offers up a justification for why she's suddenly decided Miss Brodie has to be stopped.



But I did think the book was awfully well-written - particularly the way that the girls talk about sex when they're eleven and twelve, when they've developed an intense theoretical interest/repulsion about sex. The girls are at once at once fascinated and repelled by the idea that Miss Brodie has a love life, that she might, you know, be doing it. With our art teacher! Gross! But also romantic!

I feel that this is not uncommon, and it's also something you rarely see reflected in books.

What I’m Reading Now

Jenny Han's To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before starts slowly - I've noticed this in other stories about fake dating, they often lurch a little as they get off the ground because the premise is sort of inherently unlikely - but Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky are now safely fake-dating and the story is picking up speed.

And I've begun Henry James The Bostonians, but two chapters in I can already feel ennui descending upon me. We'll see if I get through it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, a chivalric romance poem written by an Italian woman in the 1500s. One way or another I feel this has to be pretty interesting.

Comments

[landofnowhere]

I'm looking forward to your post on The Odd Women!

[osprey_archer]

Your curiosity will be satisfied tomorrow!

[kore]

Moderata Fonte's Floridoro, a chivalric romance poem written by an Italian woman in the 1500s

Oh my! How did you hear about that one?

Spark is a fantastic writer, but a lot of the time after finishing her books I feel sort of sick. And also like I'm probably missing about 25% of what's really going on.

[osprey_archer]

I read a book about Renaissance Italian how-to manuals which mentioned one of Fonte's other books, about a group of women arguing about the place of women in society in a Venetian garden full of misandrist sculptures, and when I was trying to find that one I discovered this instead.

The picture Spark paints of humanity in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is so ugly - and yet mostly in such small, petty ways - and it sort of sticks to your mind afterward, like an oil slick.

[rachelmanija]

I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a play and didn't realize it was based on a novel! In the play, the inciting incident for the "betrayal" is clearly the girl who gets killed, though there's clearly also some other motives in the mix.

[osprey_archer]

I've been waffling about whether I want to see the movie, but if the play has a clear inciting incident then it seems likely that the movie does too. In the book, really the only thing that suggests that it's the inciting incident is its proximity to the "betrayal"; Sandy doesn't much care about the girl and doesn't react when Miss Brodie mentions her own part in her death, so despite the suggestive timing it doesn't feel like a motive.

[sovay]

I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a play and didn't realize it was based on a novel!

I discovered it first as the 1969 film (it was my introduction to Maggie Smith! And Pamela Franklin). I still haven't read the novel.

[marycatelli]

I thought it was the girl who got killed, too.

Then, this is the first book I read where I figured out the culprit by the tropes, not the clues. It suffered for that.

[thawrecka]

I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for English Lit in year 11 and hated it but I remember the betrayal making perfect sense to me back then. That might have been just because I found both characters so thoroughly odious, though.

[osprey_archer]

It's totally believable that Sandy would betray Miss Brodie. I guess I just wanted a clearer throughline on why - why then? what tipped her over the edge? Surely Sandy has an opinion on why she suddenly decided that Miss Brodie Must Be Stopped, but the book doesn't share it with the readers.