SOURCE: "Jean Brodie, the Girls, the Gate," in Muriel Spark, Methuen, 1986, pp. 63-86.

A Scottish poet and critic, Bold has written extensively on Scottish literature. In the following excerpt, he remarks on language and character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Several of Muriel Spark's novels place characters in insulated areas, contain them in tightly knit communities: the pilgrim centre in The Comforters (1957), the island in Robinson (1958), the geriatric ward in Memento Mori (1959), the hostel in The Girls of Slender Means (1963), the big house in Not to Disturb (1971), the apartment in The Hothouse by the East River (1973), the convent in The Abbess of Crewe (1974). Nowhere in Spark's output is the microcosmic world-within-a-world scenario more skilfully realized than in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), arguably her masterpiece. Rapidly written in eight weeks, the novel is set in and around an Edinburgh girls' school—Marcia Blaine, modelled on...