The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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  • #21
cynic said:
Some intriguing stuff, I never thought to look at some of Spark's other work for potential clues. Thanks AC.
Click to expand...


Thanks Cynic,

Its amazing what can be found in not only her works but her life. Cynic its as if she emulated her in a way. If you look at photo's of Spark's, its almost creepy how similar they are. The hair, the posture, the way they dressed, even the way they held themselves. Does adoration of your favorite author make you a killer? No. But put it all together and you start to see a bigger picture.

Patsy, unlike some opinions of her, wasnt naive and ignorant of the wicked ways of the world. She didnt need to see movies like Ransom or Dirty Harry, she just needed her unwitting mentor and her 22+ novellas.

I hope you find more of interest in the other posts.... Oh and please feel free to take anything I post and do what ever you like with it....
 
  • #22
Looking at Spark's works prior to 1997 (since Jon Benet died at the end of '96), I found something a bit disturbing in the description for her book, Aiding and Abetting:

"In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose.

When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife."
 
  • #23
chemgirl said:
Looking at Spark's works prior to 1997 (since Jon Benet died at the end of '96), I found something a bit disturbing in the description for her book, Aiding and Abetting:

"In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose.

When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife."
Click to expand...


Smart Cookie, that one is in my next series of posts.. Creepy huh?
 
  • #24
20060415_muriel_spark.jpg


wow,I 've never actually seen a picture of her.

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=6476

“I think I have opened doors and windows in the mind, and challenged fears — especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.”
 
  • #25
 
  • #26
  • #27
chemgirl said:
Looking at Spark's works prior to 1997 (since Jon Benet died at the end of '96), I found something a bit disturbing in the description for her book, Aiding and Abetting:

"In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose.

When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife."
Click to expand...


Chemgirl, the publish date is 2000 and based on another crime. My purpose for using this, is to show that sparks had a deep dark method of writing and P had been reading this type of book. After all, this is her favorite author.. Some here might believe that anything written after JBR wouldnt apply and it doesnt as it pertains to the crime scene.

Aiding and Abetting, is a novel by Muriel Spark published in 2000, six years before her death. Unlike her other novels, it is based partly on a documented occurrence; however, as the author states in a note, she takes liberties with the facts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiding_and_Abetting_(novel)

From Publishers Weekly
Terse, astringent and blessed with a wicked satiric wit, Spark has been casting a jaundiced eye on British society in more than 20 works of fiction, including Memento Mori and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Here she spins an inspired "what-if" scenario on the criminal career of the notorious seventh Earl of Lucan, convicted in absentia in 1974 of bludgeoning his children's nanny to death and severely wounding his wife, before eluding the police and leaving the country. It was clear at the time, Spark reminds readers, that "Lucky" Lucan could not have avoided capture unless he was liberally supplied with funds, undoubtedly by other members of the arrogant aristocracy who considered class loyalty more important than justice, and whose warped morality convinced them that they were above the law. Spark's ingenious plot, set in the present, features two men who identify themselves as the fugitive Lucan when they (separately) consult a notorious Paris psychiatrist, Hildegard Wolf. Wolf's unconventional methods have made her famous, but in this case she is bewildered by the situation until one of the men threatens her with blackmail. Lucan, it turns out, is not the only one with blood on his hands. Wolf was born Beate Pappenheim in Bavaria, and under that name perpetrated a notorious scam in which she passed herself off as a stigmatic, creating her "wounds" with her menstrual blood. After soliciting contributions to perform "miracles," she absconded with millions. As the narrative unfolds, the reader is immersed in a puzzling maze with three characters who are all imposters and fraudsDone of whom is a murderer, too. Only a writer of Spark's caliber could get away with the coincidences in the blatantly manipulated plot but, then again, she writes brilliantly about the criminal mind. (Feb. 20)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. amazon.com
 
  • #28
Dame Muriel Spark was nearly forty years of age when she completed The Comforters, her first novel. Over the next five decades she published twenty-one novels, three volumes of short stories and an occasional play, a collection of poetry and children’s work. The phenomenal success of Spark’s sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—as a stage-play, feature film and television series—has ensured that she retains a popular appeal. After gaining several literary prizes and academic awards, she is now widely considered to be one of the most engaging and tantalizing writers of her generation. What is extraordinary about Spark’s achievement is that as well as having a large international readership she manages to engage with many of the most serious intellectual issues of her time. It is typical of her work that it both gestures towards and acknowledges many of the debates and concerns of the age without ever being wholly reliant on them.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/spark-muriel
 
  • #29
  • #30
Shuffling the Cards
Muriel Spark's collection of stories offers something for everyone.

Most of her short stories do indeed focus on one idea; few are expansive, and she seems to have got even sparer in recent years: some of the previously uncollected pieces in ''Open to the Public,'' her new collection, are as little as three or four pages. The most conspicuous exception to this pattern is ''The Go-Away Bird,'' by far the longest story in the book, and one of several set wholly or partly in colonial or southern Africa -- an excursion into Doris Lessing territory, with heat, boredom and sexual repression interrupted by sudden violence. The second-longest story, ''Bang-Bang You're Dead,'' is another with an African setting, though this time the tale is told in a series of flashbacks from the vantage point of a presumably English present. Fairly early on we learn that three of the principal characters will end up dead, but the question is who will murder whom, and why. This is an unusually well-made piece, with a satisfying twist in the tail. It resembles a good many of Dame Muriel's stories in its use of violent death, rather plainly, almost flatly described, and in a certain iciness. ''Am I a woman,'' the chief character asks herself calmly at the end, ''or an intellectual monster?''

But in other ways these stories are untypical of Dame Muriel's work. Few of her stories come to such well-rounded conclusions; many contain supernatural elements; and most are told in the first person. In ''You Should Have Seen the Mess'' the narrator is a lower-middle-class young woman, whose anxious maintaining of a prim gentility blinds her to real class and leads her to throw away a chance of happiness. Such use of the unreliable narrator is comparatively conventional (and the story bears a loose resemblance to ''The Lady's Maid,'' by Katherine Mansfield), though it is beautifully done. But usually Dame Muriel's narrators, however different their experiences, speak with a particular timbre that she has made her own -- brisk, practical, slightly sharp. These sensible tones collide with the often bizarre nature of what they describe. A couple of stories are narrated by what turn out to be the ghosts of murdered women. This allows the writer the sardonic coolness of such sentences as ''He looked as if he would murder me and he did'' and ''With a great joy I recognized what it was I had left behind me, my body lying strangled on the floor.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/reviews/971026.26jenkynt.html
 
  • #31
A Brief Biography of Muriel Spark
Vern Lindquist


Just before she wrote "The Pearly Shadow" Spark underwent Jungian therapy for nervous exhaustion. Although her therapist was a priest, not a psychiatrist, the situation may have suggested "The Pearly Shadow." "The Leaf-Sweeper" (Collected Stories I) shows more explicitly the influence of Jungian theory. Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society for the Abolition of Christmas, meets his own ghost while sweeping leaves at a mental asylum. The ghost is his antiself, who likes Christmas. As they argue about Christmas, they seem to meld into one. The narrator observes: "Really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves." Shortly after this Johnnie stops ranting about the evils of Christmas; in fact he never mentions it again and is discharged from the hospital.

Spark did not publish any stories in 1957, but in the following year she published seven, along with her first collection, The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories. "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (Norseman, January 1958) is a three-page tale similar to "The Portobello Road" in that it is also told by the ghost of a murdered woman. Spark has not included it in any of her collections. Of the other six stories published in 1958, "'A Sad Tale's Best for Winter,'" "Come Along, Marjorie," and "You Should Have Seen the Mess" (all in The Go-Away Bird) are all of a piece: character sketches about odd, marginal personages, the last two first-person narrations by rather neurotic women. (In a 1989 interview with Devoize and Valette, Spark calls "You Should Have Seen the Mess" "just really a sketch of a horrible puritanical little girl. You know, they go on like this in England."

Voices at Play: Stories and Ear-pieces , Spark's second collection of short fiction, includes the stories she wrote after the publication of The Go-Away Bird as well as four plays, the "ear-pieces." Like "The Go-Away Bird," "The Curtain Blown by the Breeze" and "Bang-bang You're Dead" are both set in Africa and chronicle murders incited by sexual relationships gone bad. In a 1989 interview with Devoize and Valette, Spark discusses the genesis of "Bang-bang You're Dead":

A school-friend of mine she wasn't a close friend was murdered. She looked very like me and that was the basis of my story.... In the hotel where I was staying, this girl was killed. I heard it. I heard the bangs. That was a terrible experience.... We looked very much alike. Altogether this was the basis later on for a story.

"The Dark Glasses" also concerns a murder, but the real focus of the story is the narrator's fascination with hiding her identity as witness behind her glasses until the last line: "I think it was then she recognised me." Such dramatic irony comes into play with "A Member of the Family" and "The Fathers' Daughters" as well.

[PDF]
THE THEME OF EXILE IN THE AFRICAN SHORT STORIES OF ...
 
  • #32
  • #33
I wonder if Dame Sparks was aware of this crime?

I have a question,when I googled "The prime of Miss Brodie" and Patsy Ramsey I get frequent posts that link to "SERAPH.net" but the link does not work anylonger.Aparently this links to someone who was paid to analyse the Ramsey note? Aparently this person found there was a link between the novel and the ransom note as well?
 
  • #34
Agatha_C said:
A Brief Biography of Muriel Spark
Vern Lindquist


Just before she wrote "The Pearly Shadow" Spark underwent Jungian therapy for nervous exhaustion. Although her therapist was a priest, not a psychiatrist, the situation may have suggested "The Pearly Shadow." "The Leaf-Sweeper" (Collected Stories I) shows more explicitly the influence of Jungian theory. Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society for the Abolition of Christmas, meets his own ghost while sweeping leaves at a mental asylum. The ghost is his antiself, who likes Christmas. As they argue about Christmas, they seem to meld into one. The narrator observes: "Really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves." Shortly after this Johnnie stops ranting about the evils of Christmas; in fact he never mentions it again and is discharged from the hospital.



"Advent and Lent. Both are marked with the color purple! In a strange and unexpected way, I had unconsciously woven death into the fabric of our Christmas celebration, ... Without an awareness of it's significance, I had placed the meaning of Lent in the midst of our celebration of the nativity. Beckoning to the future, the use of the deep purple ribbon suggested that what began in the cradle would end on the cross." Patsy Ramsey, DOI.


"From somewhere in the stillness at the center of my being, a thought arose and drifted into my mind. Pasty Ramsey, you need Christmas more than anyone. I blinked several times. Where did that come form? Not me. With great hesitancy, I realized that I had received a message from God." Patsy Ramsey, DOI.
Click to expand...
 
  • #35
claudicici said:
Agatha_C said:
A Brief Biography of Muriel Spark
Vern Lindquist


Just before she wrote "The Pearly Shadow" Spark underwent Jungian therapy for nervous exhaustion. Although her therapist was a priest, not a psychiatrist, the situation may have suggested "The Pearly Shadow." "The Leaf-Sweeper" (Collected Stories I) shows more explicitly the influence of Jungian theory. Johnnie Geddes, founder of the Society for the Abolition of Christmas, meets his own ghost while sweeping leaves at a mental asylum. The ghost is his antiself, who likes Christmas. As they argue about Christmas, they seem to meld into one. The narrator observes: "Really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves." Shortly after this Johnnie stops ranting about the evils of Christmas; in fact he never mentions it again and is discharged from the hospital.



"Advent and Lent. Both are marked with the color purple! In a strange and unexpected way, I had unconsciously woven death into the fabric of our Christmas celebration, ... Without an awareness of it's significance, I had placed the meaning of Lent in the midst of our celebration of the nativity. Beckoning to the future, the use of the deep purple ribbon suggested that what began in the cradle would end on the cross." Patsy Ramsey, DOI.


"From somewhere in the stillness at the center of my being, a thought arose and drifted into my mind. Pasty Ramsey, you need Christmas more than anyone. I blinked several times. Where did that come form? Not me. With great hesitancy, I realized that I had received a message from God." Patsy Ramsey, DOI.
Click to expand...


Lordy. Lordy Miss Claudi, you do see what I see.... Take these snips below..

This allows the writer the sardonic coolness of such sentences as ''He looked as if he would murder me and he did'' and ''With a great joy I recognized what it was I had left behind me, my body lying strangled on the floor.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/2...26jenkynt.html

Momento Mori....

Just take the meaning of the title and its description.... The most obvious places to look for memento mori meditations are in funeral art and architecture. Perhaps the most striking to contemporary minds is the transi, or cadaver tomb, a tomb that depicts the decayed corpse of the deceased. This became a fashion in the tombs of the wealthy in the fifteenth century, and surviving examples still create a stark reminder of the vanity of earthly riches. Later, Puritan tomb stones in the colonial United States frequently depicted winged skulls, skeletons, or angels snuffing out candles. These are among the numerous themes associated with skull imagery.

Scott ross interview for the 700 club....

I have this vivid recollection, this picture in my mind of JonBenet, blowing out this candle. She is kneeling in front of the pint-size altar, blowing out her candle and watching the smoke rise. http://www.cbn.com/700club/scottross/interviews/jonbenet2.aspx

Thanks for joining in this discussion with me Claudici, I seem to be obsessed with this theory...lol
Click to expand...
 
  • #36
Wow - the Jean Brodie stuff really opened my eyes! :what:

Of course in the movie she was played by the brilliant Maggie Smith. Was a copy of the movie found in the house too?

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmNQVo1qpD8"]The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Trailer - YouTube[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5RUAV7ZiVc&feature=related"]Dialogue bits from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - YouTube[/ame]
 
  • #37
http://www.enotes.com/muriel-spark-criticism/spark-muriel-vol-2/spark-muriel-1918

[Although the early novels of Muriel Spark] are hardly long enough to be called anything more than novelle … the conciseness of the writing in works like The Comforters, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie gives a weight and toughness that make them seem bigger than they are. It is difficult to summarize her quality…. [Mrs.] Spark has a Godlike view of time, ranging easily into the future lives of her characters and showing her readers what is mercifully hidden from the characters themselves. Along with this goes a curious callousness in the disposing of them. There is a lot of cold violence—often mentioned obliquely, never dwelt upon—which tends to take grotesque forms, like smothering in hay or killing with a corkscrew.

Or using a paintbrush to make a garotte! (my words. Just wanted to clear that up)
 
  • #38
Hello Fox,

Welcome to my madness..... Thought provoking ideas huh? Without proof its just a theory like all the others but until Im given proof that its wrong, my theory it remains....
 
  • #39
The basic intention of Muriel Spark's novels has not always been clear to critics. The reaction of many has been that while Muriel Spark possesses originality, wit, and imagination as well as obvious skill in handling of plots and characterization, there is a certain confusion about the underlying meanings of her novels. John Updike points out that the reader is well aware that beneath the pleasurable, and often quite funny, narratives are serious and troubling "currents of destruction, cruelty, madness, and sexual repression which well up unexpectedly here and there as they do in life." The supernatural, presented without any attempt by the author to explain it, adds to the reader's sense of puzzlement….

http://www.enotes.com/muriel-spark-criticism/spark-muriel-vol-2/spark-muriel-1918
 
  • #40
For the record, I am in no way trying to cast a negative light on Dame Muriel Spark. You should read her books and form your own opinions of her works on whether you enjoyed it or not. Let me assure you she is a well loved author...
 
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