“She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end”

Muriel Spark the novelist might have been thinking of the influences on Muriel Camberg the student when she gave to Miss Jean Brodie a confident and memorable boast about the pedagogical power of early exposure to dogmatic views. Spark does not rework the cliche that a brush with death will make appreciate being alive all the more. She aims deeper than that: “to remember one’s death is, in short, a way of life”. In imitation of a dispassionate Calvinistic God, Spark kills off nearly everyone by the end, a slaughter that makes the corpse-strewn stage at the end of Hamlet seem under-populated. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark softens her narrative voice somewhat and broadens her canvas to look back at Edinburgh in the 1930s when she was a young girl. Spark seems determined to expose Lise’s hubris in imagining that she could play the role of the narrator-God of her own life.