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How long does it take to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie?

Muriel Spark

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark takes about 3 hours to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours

A weekend read

First published 1961. 164 pages, about 45,100 words.

6 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 5 hours 1 minute
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours
Fast, 400 words a minute 1 hour 53 minutes

The page count is the median across 59 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II "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.

Subjects: Teacher-student relationships, Women teachers, Girls, Fiction, Scotland, fiction, Teachers, fiction

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