Thanks for the info you posted. The explanation of a “proxy lover” was new to me … one of those things I kinda wish I hadn’t learned.
True – no remorse, no moral compass. The narrator described it as follows: “Just as an excessive sense of guilt can drive people to excessive action, so was Miss Brodie driven to it by an excessive lack of guilt.”
At first, I didn’t quite understand the purpose of the character of Joyce Emily, the girl who tried unsuccessfully to get into the Brodie set. She appears only briefly, and then has the unusual fate (for an Edinburgh school girl) of being killed after running away to Spain to fight for Franco. But I realize it was the catalyst for Sandy to finally get Miss Brodie fired. It might never have happened without such an extreme event.
Maybe Sandy became Teddy Lloyd’s lover because she saw it as the ultimate revenge on Jean Brodie, taking what she knew Miss Brodie wanted for herself.
I know this psychiatric term has been bandied about a lot in recent years (no comment), and it was not coined until four year afterThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was written, but Jean Brodie = malignant narcissist.
A person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder may:
Exaggerate their achievements and talents, or expect to be recognized as superior without accomplishments to support this.
Be preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love.
Believe that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status individuals.
Require excessive admiration.
Have a sense of entitlement or unreasonable expectations of overly favorable treatment or expect automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
Take advantage of others to achieve their requirements.
Lack empathy and is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of them.
Malignant narcissists often rise to power because their ruthless drive, lack of empathy, and shameless manipulation are frequently mistaken for bold strength, charm, and decisive leadership.
The above might explain why there was so little concern on the part of the parents in the novel. Anyway, in those days, I don’t think parents questioned teacher methods much; it’s not like today. Also, Brodie’s girls (except for Mary) were among the smartest in the school and the most successful academically – probably another reason parents turned a blind eye to Brodie’s behavior.
I had remembered Goodbye Mr. Chips as a pleasant little novel, but wow, what a disappointment! Treacle-y, sentimental, maudlin and almost completely devoid of plot. I did not find (harumph) Chips to be even moderately interesting. Do not understand how it became a bestseller!
Miss Brodie is a lot more interesting to talk about!
They may have been the smartest, but the headmistress complains that her students don’t pass the end of the year exams. (I’d have thought that was grounds for firing her years ago.)
Reviews keep telling me that it is brilliant and complex, but I guess I’m never destined to be one of Brodie’s set because I simply don’t see it. Disregarding for the moment the extreme unlikelihood that the school would have hired her (assuming she was able to dissemble sufficiently to get through the interview) she would have been fired for either her extracurricular activities with the music teacher or her lack of curricular adherence; she’s a terrible teacher. Where are the parents that they allow their daughters to be taken on unscheduled and unsupervised visits, even to art museums? Not only does she idolize Hitler and Mussolini, she emulates them in the classroom, functioning as an autocratic charismatic leader.
And yet, the Brodie set doesn’t have any “team spirit,” an allegiance that Brodie ironically despises. The only “team” to which they are to show loyalty is Brodie herself. Indeed, the head attempts to break up the clique by placing them into different houses in the senior school.
And her “teaching?” She states something and then demands that a student repeat it.
“Education means a leading out, for e out and duco, I lead…what is education, Mary?”
Personally, I found very little redeeming about Miss Brodie. They could take art appreciation or similar in college—without foundational English and math, they would have been severely handicapped. She was very autocratic and quite cutting and cruel to anyone who displeased her in any way.
I grew to truly dislike reading “umph” though according to AI his boys found it endearing.
In James Hilton’s classic 1934 novella Goodbye, Mr. Chips, “umph” serves as the signature verbal tic of the beloved schoolmaster, Mr. Arthur Chipping.
As the eccentric Latin teacher ages through his forty-three-year tenure at the Brookfield boarding school, his speech becomes famously punctuated with these small grunt-like pauses. Rather than distancing him from his pupils, this habit makes him incredibly endearing to generations of students, who warmly imitate his distinct style of talking.
Whether he is stubbornly defending traditional Latin pronunciations against modern educational reforms—protesting making boys say “Kickero” when for the rest of their lives they will say “Cicero”—or calmly instructing his class to translate Caesar’s memoirs while World War I bombs shake the school grounds, his “umph” remains a comforting anchor of stability and humor amid a rapidly changing world.
The school couldn’t prove the music teacher affair. As for her lack of curricular adherence, the Brodie set was not out to betray her. However - and a big however - the Brodie set weren’t the only girls in her class. I fully expected the betrayal to have come from someone not considered the “creme de la creme” or one of those parents.
I have found - from experience - that when parents pay money to have a child in an “elite” private school they assume they get what they pay for, at least K-8 or so.
I went to a private girls school in high school in the 1960s and 70s. My parents never got into the school’s business. While there might not have been unscheduled outings with teachers I really don’t think anyone would have questioned it. I went on a sanctioned outing to a racetrack when we had an “intensive study week” and I was doing probability. Girls slept with the stable boys and male teachers misbehaved. I only know about the ones who were caught. I think things could easily have been even more lax in Britain in the 1930s.
Just popping in to say, didn’t read this months selections, was away for two weeks, helping my daughter , and have been quite sick for last 10 days , thanks to three year old for sharing her germs, , tested negative flu and Covid, but I do think it’s Covid, absolutely No sense of smell is weird thing,
Quickly reading comments, and not unhappy I didn’t get to these selections. Looks like quite a lot for discussion ….and that’s always good
I definitely agree that Miss Brody meets the criteria to be classified as a narcissist. I don’t know why the two male teachers had a thing for her. She was really unappealing. I suppose her looks made up for her personality from their point of viewp. In the few minutes of The Prime of Miss Jean Brody movie that I watched, the music teacher came across more like a predator than a love sick man. He did not do a good job of hiding his lust. They definitely would have been caught. I thought it was great that the music teacher ended up marrying one of the other teachers!
It’s difficult to understand the appeal on paper, but those with narcissistic personality disorder can be very charismatic – hence the “cult of personality” around certain politicians. When reading, I had to just accept that Jean Brodie’s magnetism was extremely powerful. I think this might also explain her initial hiring.
One of the most common and costly mistakes we make is confusing a narcissist’s abilities with their pathology. Many narcissists are articulate, decisive, charming, and confident under pressure. They act quickly, detect weaknesses in others with remarkable speed, and appear fearless in the face of difficulty. These traits are rewarded in workplaces, organizations, teams, and even families. Why Narcissists Succeed and Get Their Way | Psychology Today
Just want to throw in the comment “UGH” about Teddy Lloyd. He was more than a garden-variety cheating husband; he was a predator. I am quite sure Sandy was not his first seduction of a student. Poor Deirdre Lloyd! She seemed like a nice woman.
It’s interesting that Teddy Lloyd was, in practice, a very terrible Catholic, yet it was his religion that Sandy ultimately absorbed, and which suited her to the point that she took vows. The Lord works in mysterious ways!
Our discussion led me to the Miss Blaine’s Prefect series by Olga Wojtas, which follows Shona McMonagle, a middle-aged alumna of Miss Blaine’s school. She is a librarian who despises Muriel Sparks’ book, but more importantly, uses her training from Marcia Blaine (in martial arts, mathematics, linguistics and literature) to travel in time and solve dangerous historical mysteries. The first title is Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen…I come not to bury Mr. Chips, but to praise him!
I listened to the audiobook – which I never do – and I found the story sweet, concise, and quietly moving. I’d chalk it up to a good narrator, except that millions of readers have shared that view since the book was first published in 1934. That said, I acknowledge that @mathmom’s adjectives are on target – the book is overly sentimental and almost entirely devoid of plot. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of that, but this particular novella made its point quickly and without fuss, and at 115 pages, didn’t overstay its welcome.
Beyond the basics of being one man’s story, critics have argued that Goodbye, Mr. Chips represents something larger.
The unexceptional steadiness of it all is the point. This is not a conventional school story but a slice of national history told through the life of one ordinary man. James Hilton was writing in what was already being referred to as the Age of Dictators and Goodbye, Mr Chips is a quiet reproof to his own times, a gentle tribute to continuity, tradition and decency. It’s also an elegy to a world that was slipping away. This 1930s novel is ‘the greatest little epic in English literature’
A 2024 article from the WSJ expounds on that idea. I’m going to quote it at length because you’ll get a paywall unless you subscribe. (The “man in a hurry” phrase refers to how quickly the book was written):
Hilton (1900-1954) was a man in a hurry, and the times in which he wrote seemed hurried, too, though they were hurtling in a bad direction. Fascism was on the rise in Europe, a reality that didn’t escape Hilton as he crafted his story about the title character, an amiably disheveled instructor in Latin and Greek at Brookfield, a fictional boarding school for boys near the dawn of the 20th century.
Although his ostensible subjects are the venerated languages of antiquity, Mr. Chips offers a much broader lesson to his young charges—namely, the value of what he calls “a sense of proportion.”
Chips underlines his point most vividly in a chapter set in World War I, when the area around Brookfield is being bombed by the Germans. Amid “the reverberating crashes of the guns and the shrill whine of anti-aircraft shells,” the crotchety instructor continues leading his pupils in the conjugation of ancient verbs. As Chips reminds his anxious listeners, they “cannot . . . judge the importance of things . . . by the noise they make.”
Chips is obviously dismissing the violence outside his classroom window. But in a larger sense, he’s calling out extremists of all sorts who seek to win arguments by shouting the loudest. Hilton’s message resonated with particular urgency among Depression-era readers on both sides of the Atlantic, who widely embraced “Goodbye,Mr. Chips” when it was published as a book in 1934. Hilton, writing several years later about the origins of his popular novella, argued that an ideal education should provide “the flexible armor of doubt in an age when too many people are certain.” He offered those words as the poisonous politics of Europe and Japan brought World War II ever closer. https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/goodbye-mr-chips-james-hilton-1934-070eb029
After discussing the above historical context, the WSJ article goes on to describe the importance of James Hilton’s work in its approach to education:
In arguing for moderation in how we think, speak and write, Hilton seemed to practice what he preached. Recounting his title character’s long career at Brookfield, the author avoids hagiography, giving us a Mr. Chips who’s all too human. In fact, Chips spends the first part of his career doling out rote instruction, touched by “the creeping dry rot of pedagogy which is the worst and ultimate pitfall of the profession.”
Chips seems destined for dreary mediocrity, but a late-life marriage to the vivacious Katherine Bridges nudges him to learn new things. In spite of Kathie’s early death—or perhaps because of it—Chips appears resolved to continue embracing fresh ideas. In doing so, he becomes a better instructor, affirming the book’s other great truth: The best teachers are also lifelong learners, showing their students by example that curiosity is a calling we’re meant to answer the rest of our days.
That ideal is beautifully expressed at the conclusion of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” as the aged Chips struggles to hear the conversation near his deathbed. He’s inquisitive to the very end, affirming that great teachers—and great students— should embrace curiosity as a core value.
As movies such as “Stand and Deliver” and “Dead Poets Society” make clear, stories about great teachers tend toward the mythic, casting their heroes as larger than life. But Chips proves memorable precisely because he’s plausibly unassuming. Hilton crafted a character so familiar that many readers told him they’d known the original Chips from their own school days.
That’s not even the entire article, just its most salient points. I’m certainly not aiming to convince people to like Goodbye, Mr. Chips (as I did). How we feel about books is so subjective, of course! But I think the two articles quoted above give a good summary of the broader picture, considering the era in which the novella was written.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar sounds fun:
LIBRARY JOURNAL
Starred Review: DEBUT Shona McMonagle is librarian of Edinburgh’s Morningside Library, just down the road from the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, where she received the finest education in the world. She loathes getting requests for a novel presumably based on the school but riddled with errors and assumptions about its distinguished alumnae. So whenever an order arrives for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she hides the copy away to keep it from sullying the name of Marcia Blaine, defending the honor of her alma mater. Shona’s honor, her knowledge, skills, and loyalty all make her an elite recruit of a distinctly different sort, thus Marcia Blaine herself sends Shona back in time to tsarist Russia on a secret mission, where she must use all of her instruction in all sorts of murdery circumstances. VERDICT This absolutely delightful time-traveling murder mystery is perfect for fans of Jasper Fforde and Genevieve Cogman’s “Invisible Library” series as well as Russian history fans who enjoy stories with a sharp sense of humor. --Julie Kane (Reviewed 10/15/2018) (Library Journal, vol 143, issue 17, p59)
Adding it to my way-too-long list of books of interest. Thanks.
Thanks for the great rebuttal! And I did enjoy the chapter where Mr. Chips keeps teaching among the bombs. And I always association London bombing with the Blitz, but it seems blimps and bombers did quite a bit of damage in WWI as well.
I can see how both novels serve as anti-fascist novels in very different ways, which is interesting in and of itself. Goodbye Mr. Chips in some ways more impressive for having been written before the war before many knew about the true horror of Hitler. Franco did not take leadership of the Nationalist until 1936 and the Spanish Civil War did not end until 1939. Hitler of course took power earlier in 1933.
I also liked the fact that Mr. Chips, even in the midst of war with Germany, honored Max Staefel by reading his name aloud. His good sense and compassion enabled him to understand who was the true enemy and who was not.
“Those few of you who were here before the War will remember Max Staefel, the German master. He was in Germany, visiting his home, when war broke out. He was popular while he was here, and made many friends. Those who knew him will be sorry to hear that he was killed last week, on the Western Front.”
He was a little pale when he sat down afterward, aware that he had done something unusual. He had consulted nobody about it, anyhow; no one else could be blamed.
Later, outside the Chapel, he heard an argument:—
"On the Western Front, Chips said. Does that mean he was fighting for the Germans?”
“I suppose it does.”
“Seems funny, then, to read his name out with all the others. After all, he was an enemy.”
“Oh, just one of Chips’s ideas, I expect. The old boy still has ’em.”
Chips, in his room again, was not displeased by the comment. Yes, he still had 'em – those ideas of dignity and generosity that were becoming increasingly rare in a frantic world.
As the saying goes, no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. I think that’s one of the messages of Chips’ story.
