Meeting Miss Brodie, again

Just a few weeks ago I caught one of my favorite old movies on TV, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Maggie Smith was as amazing as I remembered. I've been fortunate to have some teachers in my life who influenced me greatly; none of them were "a Miss Brodie"  - but they shared her passion for teaching and her gift for "putting old heads on young shoulders." Always having known the movie was based on a book I had not read by Muriel Spark, I decided it was time to rectify that situation.

The book is a quick read (less than 150 pages in the HarperPerennial paperback edition). The novel, moreso than the movie,  is told from the point of view of one of The Brodie Set, Sandy. But the feel of the story is quite different: its setting is alternatelyThe Marcia Blaine School in early 1930s Edinburgh, and the time much later when the girls are grown and looking back on their days under Miss Brodie's influence. We learn what became of each of the six girls and of Miss Brodie, which the movie does not reveal.

I made my mental notes of where the movie had left out this or changed that; but I was most fascinated by the bigger decisions that had been made by those who created the screenplay (actually from a  successful stage play, which came first) to combine certain characters, to move certain pieces of dialog into different scenes, to prune here and emphasize a bit there, creating the engaging character study and drama that the movie surely is. What a skill that must be: to have seen the heart of the story in the little novel as the successful movie it became.