One of BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.A tour de force of contemporary Scottish literature, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is a compelling portrait of a woman’s dark quest for immortality.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an afterword by publisher Anna South.Miss Jean Brodie is a rare breed of teacher – passionate, independent-minded and romantically inspired, with not the slightest care for convention. She soon garners a devoted following of six young girls, who will become known as ‘the Brodie set’, and begins to shape them in her own image. But Miss Brodie is more than just an individual with an intense desire to control and mould her girls. Beneath the facade of this self-possessed woman lie some sinister truths, and a keen interest in fascism . . .

She has established herself in the course of one sparkling lustrum. Miss Spark is indeed an author to be grateful for in our plutonian age, Each of her sentences fulfils perfectly its own purpose, and there is never an extraneous joke. Miss Brodie makes excellent reading, No other woman writer of this generation has simultaneously attracted so much notice from the critics and achieved so much success with the public at large, Deliciously witty and eminently a ‘must’, Every word goes home like a well-aimed arrow. I doubt if there is a more original or morally aware novelist writing in English to-day

Dame Muriel Spark was born in 1918 and educated in Edinburgh, before spending a number of years in central Africa. Her novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 and was the first of twenty-two full length works of fiction that include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Loitering with Intent (1981). Although best known for her novels, Spark was also a prolific and highly successful writer in other mediums, producing a multitude of plays, poetry collections and short stories. She died in Italy in 2006; her obituary in the Telegraph remembered her as 'one of the most elegant and incisive of British novelists, famous for her astringent, vigorous prose and for the sinister and disorientating quality of her plots.'