| In the fall of 1961, The New Yorker published a work of fiction that would soon become one of the most celebrated in the magazine’s history. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, tells the comic, captivating, often unsettling tale of the title character, a teacher at an all-girls school in Edinburgh during the nineteen-thirties. A flamboyant figure who frequently departs from the approved curriculum, Miss Brodie addresses her favorite students, a clique of pre-teens, as “the crème de la crème,” and—despite their age—regularly regales them with overwrought memories of her fiancé, who died fighting in the Great War. When Miss Brodie isn’t feuding with the headmistress, she devotes herself to the girls’ extracurricular enrichment—which, incidentally, also provides a pretext for her to spend time with two of the school’s male teachers. Miss Brodie, an ardent admirer of both art history and Benito Mussolini, has recently passed into middle age, but, as she incessantly reminds her protegées, she remains very much in her “prime.” Muriel Spark was coming into her own prime as she completed the story, which would transform her career and reconfigure her personal life. Nearly forty when she published her first novel, in 1957, Spark had submitted many stories to The New Yorker, and saw one accepted, before she sent in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” The editors decided to devote nearly an entire issue to the thirty-thousand-word narrative about her fictional schoolteacher, launching Spark, who was then mostly unknown outside Britain, to international fame. In the decade that followed, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” would be adapted for the stage (Zoe Caldwell won a Tony for her portrayal of the teacher, in 1968), and then as a film (for which Maggie Smith received an Oscar, in 1970). Spark’s relationship with The New Yorker continued for more than forty fruitful years, encompassing fiction, personal essays, and numerous poems. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,” Miss Jean Brodie declares, a statement that doesn’t exactly put readers at ease. In Spark’s sly and poignant masterpiece, the author casts a less imperious spell, but one that is equally impossible to shake off. | 
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