26/4/24 This is a conscious exercise in looking back and about the publishing world. In the post WW2 period.
To a bad writer she had to look in his face and tell him exactly what she thinks about his urinating frightful prose. When you speak the plain truth out aloud how to survive the consequences. Post War London comes back to life the novel is distinctly revival.
1954. I was comfortable in my fatness known as a wonderful woman and enjoyed universal affection. A large women is definitely somebody. Then decided to be thin and right away I noticed that people didn't confide in me their thoughts so much.
Milly kept the rooming house, had met her husband in her native Cork. Katy the book keeper had survived the concentration camps of the 1930s in Germany.
With the austerity of wartime there was a shortage of paper supplies and printers, while the public were avid for books. When a couple were fighting the policeman said don't come between a husband and wife till there is a lull.
If it is widely believed you have money and wealth, this belief creates confidence and confidence makes business.
Refugees brought their courage with them. They knew far better how to tap the resources of post war Britain than the locals. The Poles sent home parcels of warm clothing. Poles had left a world of beaurocratic tyranny. Business cannot be carried out unless people are honest. Survivors of death camps were known to inflict on themselves later in life that, that they had escaped.
1954 Roger Bannister beat the 4 minute mile record and became a brain surgeon later.
A person who is a good vivacious talker, he is bound to be a good writer unfortunately is not the case.
Pisseur de copie is a hack writer as a urinator of Journalistic copy.
Cultured people are not necessary nicer people . suitable jobs can be found through the most unlikely people. People love coincidence, so tell everyone you are looking for a job.
On this new job the coworkers were handicapped in some way either physically or other, but the were agreeable people. A doctor struck off the roll or an accountant with a stammer or a woman with a port wine birthmark on her face. A daughter of a mass killer and Nancy was fat. They sent out manuscripts to readers who were mostly retired but were readers with a certain amount of education and earned some money from this. She wonders how many good writers never achieves what they should have.
To become a writer you have to write like letters to a good friend who will read it over and over as you write the story develops itself. Before you marry someone see what he is like when drunk.
The upper class could not live and would disintegrate without the ordinary class while they could live with out the upper class. On the top of the bus now 10 years after the war ended, in London there were few streets intact and houses were separated by areas of a bomb gap. London was still sooty from coal fires.
During the war women went into the Lands Army to work in agriculture as the men were fighting. V1 bombs fell from July1944.
In England love and hate are entirely different things. They are not even opposites, love comes in first from the heart, hate arises basically from principle.
Nancy now worked for a group of homosexuals who were US refugees from Senator McCarthy's political persecution and were in Highgate, North London. Americans were also becoming very much at home in France and Italy. Here she was tired of being Mrs. Hawkins and wanted to be Nancy. Everyone in this office used first names and as she had lost weight she could reinvent herself. It was easier to work for gays than strait men. Homosexualism was still against the law and it made them more hysterical than today.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 1961 128pg 10/10/25
Notes on the historic perspective of this book
The book is about the 6 girls that are the Brodie set one of them later will betray Brodie, ruining her teaching career, but that she never will learn which one. This starts in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1933.
The PM Stanley Baldwin (in office between 1924 to 1929) did not last long but his picture was on the wall in Miss McKay's class as his slogan was Safety First but truth and beauty comes first, she says.
She was engaged to Hugh at the beginning of the war but he fell in Flanders.
They walk past "idle" people waiting for the dole she says you call them unemployed. "Mussolini has put an end to unemployment" In history Edinburgh owes a lot to the French. Boys were keen on the poetry of Auden and Eliot and supported the Republic side in the Spanish Civil War.
James Hogg , Scots poet from 1770 to 1835
In the 1930s their were legions of women aged 30 and upwards teachers in war bereaved spinsterhood. Miss Brodi considered Edinburgh as a European capital the city of Hume and Boswell. Many school mistresses earned their keep and lived with aged parents.
They discuss Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 to 1882) was the painter and poet who was a close friend and key influence on writer Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 to 1909)
For Senior school should they take the Modern or the Classical, with better grades they got into the Classical but the Modern made more senses as they learn Spanish, French or German instead of Latin and Greek. Better to get a job with or in any case most of the girls would be getting married and a modern language was more useful. All the girls learn piano.
Miss Brodi took them to see Anna Pavlova in ballet 1881 to 1931 (error as we are in 1933)
She went to church on Sunday morning and did a rote of the Protestant denomination but to her the Church of Rome was based on superstitions and was only for people who did not want to think for themselves. Yet she went to bed with the singing master and loved Italy. She was forced to retire at the end of summer 1939 on the grounds that she had been teaching fascism. Sandy saw the canvasses in Mr. Lloyds studio with all the Brodie portraits and decided she had to put a stop to it and remembered the picture of troops marching in black shirts on the wall. By now she had become a nun as sister Helena in the Catholic church whose ranks had found quite a number of fascists worse than Miss Brodie.
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