The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
London: Macmillan & Co:, 1961. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover with Dust Jacket.
Listed by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. It was adapted to film in 1969 for which Maggie Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Light green cloth with gilt spine titles. The bindings are tight and square. Text clean, light even toning. Moderate shelf handling wear. Previous owner’s name on the top of the front free endpage. The unclipped dust wrapper with artwork by Victor Reinganum has modest handling with a touch of rubs on the spine tips and corners. First Edition, First Printing.
Very Good / Very Good. Item #15566
“a remarkable series of comic tales,”
Most of us have known someone like Miss Jean Brodie. She may have been a teacher, as in Mrs. Spark's novel, a somewhat disreputable aunt or an unspeakable cousin, perhaps the mother of one's best friend. Miss Brodie is a preposterous woman. She seizes upon the docile little girls (in a respectable Edinburgh school during the Nineteen Thirties) and makes them her elect, her "créme de la créme."
She spins tales of her dead lover; she tells them about Giotto, she introduces them to the secrets of cosmetics; she tries to make them Europeans instead of dowdy little provincials. Miss Brodie's hectic and undisciplined enthusiasms include fascism as well as Tennyson; each is an approach to the Absolute she seeks.
For Miss Brodie has triumphantly entered her "prime." She speaks of it with such conviction that it becomes a visible presence to her girls, like a splendid garment. And yet, ridiculous as it is, Miss Brodie's prime is a vitality of spirit that is just as real as the girls imagined. NYT Review, 1962.
Adapted to film by Ronald Neame in 1969; Maggie Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Ref: Arany, 7; Connolly, 260
Price: $385.00
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