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Miss Brodie herself is a mass of contradictions. A seventh and late arrival is Joyce Emily Hammond.

At the start the flamboyantly dogmatic Miss Brodie, having reached the age of 39, is in her prime, as she puts it, and has chosen to share it with those chosen few, specifically six girls of her set: Monica Douglas, Rose Stanley, Eunice Gardner, Sandy Stranger, Jenny Gray and Mary Macgregor. The novel opens in 1936 when the girls are 16, flashes back to 1930 when they are in the Junior School, in Miss Brodie’s sole charge, and ends in 1938, with a final flash forward to the unexpected death of Miss Brodie, aged 56, in 1946: a span of sixteen years. The so-called Brodie set of girls are what she calls the crème de la crème, the elite, the elect, the chosen few, chosen by Miss Brodie herself, their presiding deity. It is set in 1930s Edinburgh, and the characters include schoolgirls at Marcia Blaine’s High School for Girls, the dull headmistress Miss Mackay, the singing teacher, the art master and, of course, the unforgettable Miss Brodie, the mainspring of the action. Muriel Spark’s most famous novel was published in 1961.