Oh, dear. I have discovered a great evil. Many of Dame Maggie Smith’s movies are, in their entirety, on Youtube.
OH THE TIME WHICH WILL BE WASTED. This is TERRIBLE, because it’s been ages since I watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. And I’d NEVER seen her in “Memento Mori” which is another of my favorite novels by Muriel Sparks, and my, are we overdue.
It is the face of a youthful Maggie Smith I always imagine when I think of Miss Jean in Spark’s novel. By turns haughty and harrowed, alienating and …alone, she is a complex character of questionable moral judgment, leading little girls to love her, loathe her, and eventually shake off her influence like a dog shakes water from its back. (Ah, Rose. Famous for sex, was she? ONLY WITH HER HUSBAND, despite your machinations, madam.) I dearly wish I’d gotten to see a Scottish version of this play; I would have LOVED to hear a lilting Edinburgh accent (our Maggie tried her best, but…) and seen the hints of dark humor the setting implied. I loved this book in college — though I can’t say I understood all of it then. All I knew was that she was the wrong kind of teacher to emulate, and taught accordingly.
Growing up to move past being one of her protégés must have been a wrench.
Brodie’s Set
Thrilled that we could know her, we paid
Homage to her
Every phrase. A
Paragon among us, we revered her –
Rightly – sought her praise.
Imperative you understand: we
Mostly thought ourselves immune;
Embodying her eminence,
Official singers of her tune. But as we grew – matured a bit – we
Found her influence malign. The
Machinations to achieve
In all things what she called “her prime”
Slipped into some of us desire \outside her
Shadow, long, to climb. So…
Jeopardizing secrets we were taking to the grave, we
Exercised our options, found new ways we could behave.
Accomplices no more to feed an aging drama queen
Naiveté gave way to wisdom none could contravene.
I liked the movie, but never read the book. I don’t think I was quite aware of Maggie Smith before seeing it. There was a girl in our college dorm we nicknamed Miss Brodie. She was quite a ringleader of all the girls on her floor, called them the Brodie Girls.
You’ve captured Miss Brodie’s essence and the progression of the story in your wonderful acrostic. Love the final stanza especially. Brava!
I saw the movies WELL after I read the book. I was a huge Spark fan in college — because the professor I admired was very into Muriel Spark, Joan Dideon, and Margaret Atwood — I got started and very well in rooted in good but older literature.
I found Brodie fascinating, but rereading the books later, sort of terrifying.