There's a plot afoot - again - to unseat Miss Brodie at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh.

Read by Gerda Stevenson

Muriel Spark's best-known and best-loved novel tells the justly enduring story of Jean Brodie - a school teacher who eschews the normal curriculum in favour of lessons on the Italian Renaissance painters, on Mussolini and with stories of her own love life.

As she seeks to mould her 'set' of girls 'of an impressionable age', into the 'crème de la crème', and as her love life becomes complicated by affections for, and from, the art and the singing masters, she identifies two girls, one of 'instinct' and one of 'insight', in whom her ambitions will chiefly lie. But despite her own unassailable convictions, life does not always work out as planned and amongst her own set there will be those who begin to question her authority and her purpose.

A writer with a keen eye, a biting wit and a pithy sense of the comic, Muriel Spark created in Jean Brodie a character who remains as vivid and recognisable as she was in 1963, the year the book was published. Charismatic, unfettered by school boundaries, literal or metaphorical, she is the teacher who steps beyond the bounds of prescriptive education to the true sense of the word - opening the eyes of her girls to a wider world.

Spark also captures the city of Edinburgh, a character in itself, and of a time - those years in the 1930s when, denied conventional marriage, war-bereaved women sought other paths to fulfilment.

Sparkling, funny, fresh and tragic, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fully deserves its place in the canon of 20th century literature.

Abridged in five parts by Sally Marmion.

Producer: Di Speirs

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2013. Show less