The Story of How One Literary Character Inspired Another
With a sneak peek at The Good Death of Kate Montclair
Inspirations and influences.
We cannot write without them.
The other day I posted a Story on Instagram—
(Wait. Not following my Insta? Come on over and join the fun @danielmcinerny_studiostories)
—about the influence of Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie, the anti-heroic heroine of her 1962 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, upon Adele Schraeder, a character from my soon-to-be-published novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (coming March 2023 from Chrism Press. Pre-order here.)
Instead of just telling you how Spark’s Jean Brodie influenced my Adele Schraeder, let me show you.
Ready for a sneak peek from The Good Death of Kate Montclair? For being among the first to join me behind-the-scenes at Daniel McInerny’s Studio Stories, you certainly deserve a “first look.”
The passage I’m going to put before you is modeled (loosely) on the following passage from the beginning of Chapter 3 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where Spark’s omniscient narrator gives the backstory on Jean Brodie…
“It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head. She was alone, merely, in that she taught at a school like Marcia Blaine’s. There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion” (p. 43 of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition).
Now, here is my protagonist, Kate Montclair giving (in first-person narration) the backstory on Adele Schraeder…
A Sneak Peek at The Good Death of Kate Montclair
But who was Adele Schraeder? Where did she come from?
She was a Londoner born to British parents. Her father was the editor of a socialist weekly, and her mother had been a schoolteacher who died young of leukemia. Adele always took great pride in the fact that her mother, before she started teaching, played bit parts in a couple of Ealing Studios comedies from the 1950s. “Her comic timing was always pristine,” she liked to say, “not least when she conceived me.” She’d known her father longer and better, of course, and unabashedly adored him and his quixotic politics. “Daddy’s heyday was the Thatcher administration, when he and the paper became a prominent gadfly. Indeed, if Margaret Thatcher had never existed, my father would have had to invent her.” From her mother, Adele inherited her beauty and asense of style, her quick wit and gift for mimicry. To her father, she owed her magpie mind and taste for crusades.
As an adolescent, Adele attended a comprehensive high school in London—a public school, in the American sense. At sixteen, she had a boyfriend six or seven years older than she. By the time she was eighteen, she worked regularly as a model, spending weekends on photoshoots all over England. She was not keen on university, but after graduation, she moved to New York and enrolled at the New School, where she entertained vague thoughts of becoming an artist or an actress. There she learned to dislike Americans, whom she believed, with rare exceptions, were genetically incapable of conceptual thought. After a year, she transferred to the London School of Economics, where she majored in philosophy.
After college, she still took the odd modeling or acting job—Roberto was not wrong about her talent—but by this point she had discovered her taste for Ideas, for movements and counter-movements, revolutions and manifestoes. This meant that she made herself unemployable. Eventually, she did what every liberal arts major does when she’s desperate for work: she turned to teaching.
By the time I came to WIX [Wildwood International Catholic School], Adele had already taught there for two years and would remain for five years in total. She took a job at an international school in Rome because a job was offered and because Rome sounded like an adventure. But at WIX, despite her idiosyncratic and at times titillating lesson plans—The Last Tango in Paris, I assure you, was not an official part of the WIX English curriculum—Adele was not a popular teacher. Her mannerisms and enthusiasm made her a figure of fun for most of her students. She had little ability, much less patience, to connect with the bored adolescent female. She had no empathy for those who could not follow her zigzagging tangents. Her methods were lost on ninety percent of her students. But for that last ten percent, she was an idol.
Jean Brodie : : Adele Schraeder
What does Adele Schraeder have in common with Jane Brodie?
Most obviously, they are both unmarried schoolteachers
Adele’s “taste for crusades” matches the “voyages of discovery” into (progressive) new ideas and energetic practices undertaken by those of Jean Brodie’s ilk
They are both beautiful, charming, and charismatic
Adele’s charisma, like Jean Brodie’s, attracts to herself a coterie of girls (in Spark’s novel this is “the Brodie set”) whom she seeks to influence with her progressive ideas. At one point Adele Schraeder describes herself by saying, “I’m like Socrates in reverse. Instead of leading people to the great heaven of ideas, I lead them to the body.” (This is also shows Adele’s Miss Brodie-like penchant for the memorable aphorism.)
Both Adele and Jean Brodie also both customarily speak with an air of total authority—on every subject, as though a note of doubt has never crept into either one of their minds.
Jean Brodie and Adele Schraeder also have another thing in common: we only know them through the point of view of other characters. Their lives are not dramatized directly. What my reader will learn of Adele Schraeder comes principally through the observations, feelings, and experiences of Kate Montclair. Just as what the reader of Spark’s novel learns of Jean Brodie comes through the experience and observations of her students and lovers.
I learned this from the critic James Wood, who observes the following about Jean Brodie:
“If you ask people what they “know” about Miss Brodie, they will likely recite a number of aphorisms: “I am in my prime,” “you are the crème de la crème,” and so on. These are Jean Brodie’s famous tags. Miss Brodie, in other words, is not really “known” at all. We know her just as her young pupils knew her, as a collection of sayings, a rhetorical performance, a teacher’s show” (from Wood’s essay on Spark, “Never Apologize, Never Explain” from the Guardian, April 22, 2006).
This assessment is a touch too strong. Even though she is never dramatized except through the prism of another character’s point of view, we see enough of Miss Brodie to be able to form an independent evaluation of her as more than a mere collection of sayings.
Nonetheless, it is true that Miss Brodie achieves a kind of mythical status as a character because she is only seen from the point of view of those who are in thralldom to her.
It is though we only see her being filmed from the angle of the “hero shot,” the camera positioned low and looking up at her as larger than life.
Like Spark does in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I wanted to tell a story in The Good Death of Kate Montclair about the sway a sure-minded, strong-willed woman has upon others.
Not upon a group of students, primarily—though, as the passage I quoted indicates, Adele Schraeder does captivate a certain percentage of her students.
No, I wanted to explore the hold Adele Schraeder has upon various adults. Upon those who gather at Cool Beans Coffee every first Thursday of the month for the Death Symposium.
And upon her friend, the gravely ill Kate Montclair.
Both Jean Brodie and Adele Schraeder represent the power that teachers, so-called “experts,” and even friends may hold over us.
It is a power that can be used for great good.
But also, for great evil.
As I look back now upon the completed novel of The Good Death of Kate Montclair, I see that I myself have been under the sway of Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie. She has exerted a certain power over my own efforts to build a character—teaching me, first, how a character can achieve “mythic” status by being exclusively portrayed from the vantage point of others.
And, second, how the boldest efforts of such a character to work her will upon others can have the most unexpected results.
But for an explanation of that last point, you’re going to have to read The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
P.S. And yes, I think a younger Maggie Smith would play Adele Schraeder to perfection. (Adele Schraeder is 60). Who would you cast to play her today?