The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

Download or read book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Download or read book The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic) written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1998-04-17 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."

Download or read book Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar written by Olga Wojtas and published by Felony & Mayhem Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A librarian with deceptively dangerous skills is sent back in time to Tzarist Russia in this “laugh-out-loud farce” and homage to Muriel Spark (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Never underestimate a librarian. Comfortable padded and in her middle years, Shona McMonagle may look bookish and harmless, but her education at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls has left her with a deadly expertise in everything from martial arts to quantum physics. It has also left her with a bone-deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, that scurrilous novel that spread scandalous untruths about the finest educational institution in Edinburgh. Shona’s skills, her deceptively mild appearance, and her passionate loyalty make her the perfect recruit for an interesting new project: time travel to Tzarist Russia, prevent a gross miscarriage of romance, and—in any spare time—see to it that only the right people get murdered. It’s a big job, but no task is too daunting for a prefect from Miss Blaine’s. “A delightful addition to the ranks of comic crime.” —The Guardian, UK

Download or read book All the Poems of Muriel Spark written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available at last are all the poems by one of the twentieth century's greatest British writers, Dame Muriel Spark: "a true literary artist, acerbic and exhilarating" (London Evening Standard).

Download or read book Muriel Spark written by Martin Stannard and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.

Download or read book Peking Picnic written by Ann Bridge and published by . This book was released on 1936 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book You Feel It Just Below the Ribs written by Jeffrey Cranor and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting, provocative novel, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography in an alternate twentieth century that chronicles one woman’s unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save. Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work—disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends, and The New Society arises. To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth? A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.