#36 in Literary fiction
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- 164
- Pages
- about 3 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” fits a decade of one teacher’s sway over her pupils into a short, slyly amusing novel. Some readers take it as a warning rather than a tribute to an inspiring teacher, though they doubt it works as well today. Muriel Spark follows Miss Brodie and her chosen girls at a 1930s Edinburgh school, glancing ahead to their later lives.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a novel by Muriel Spark, the best known of her works. It was first published in The New Yorker magazine and was published as a book by Macmillan in 1961. The character of Miss Jean Brodie brought Spark international fame and brought her into the first rank of contemporary Scottish literature. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to present. In 2026, it placed #31 on The Guardian's list of the 100 best novels of all time.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.1 across 104 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 41% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Literary fiction average of 8.1. That is how 7.7 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.3 | 6 | 6% |
| Hardcover | 7.0 | 98 | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie?
It has 164 pages — shorter than 97% of the ranked books in Literary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Literary fiction — with scores between 7.7 and 8.1, closest to this book.
