Muriel Spark's sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was first published in 1961 by The New Yorker magazine and later in that year by Macmillan in Britain. It is probably the most well known of all her novels and has attracted critical responses from prestigious academics including Frank Kermode and David Lodge. Kermode praised Spark as a “remarkable virtuoso being in her prime” (“The House of Fiction”, 1963), while Lodge described his essay on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a “personal act of amends” for an earlier negative review (“The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience”, 1971). In general, there is lack of critical consensus about Spark's work. It is certainly easy to read this novel in a cursory way. Its blac

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Published 20 September 2002

Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 September 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7450, accessed 9 February 2010.]