Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

The line is spoken by Jean Brodie, the charismatic, domineering teacher at the center of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Set in 1930s Edinburgh, the book follows Brodie’s handpicked “set” of schoolgirls, whom she seeks to shape according to her own tastes, politics, and romantic ideals. Brodie’s claim that she can secure a girl “for life” reflects her self-mythologizing sense of vocation and her conviction that early adolescence is the decisive period for forming loyalties. The novel’s irony lies in how Brodie’s influence persists but also rebounds unpredictably as the girls mature and resist or reinterpret her lessons.

The quotation crystallizes the novel’s critique of charismatic authority and the ethics of education. Brodie frames teaching as possession: if she reaches students at a malleable age, she can imprint her worldview permanently. Spark invites readers to hear both the seduction and the menace in that confidence—an educator’s genuine desire to inspire sliding into manipulation and control. The line also gestures toward broader themes of ideological formation: how fascinations, loyalties, and even political sympathies can be cultivated through aesthetic and emotional appeal rather than reasoned argument. Its significance is heightened by the novel’s later revelations, which show that “influence for life” can take the form of betrayal, distortion, or unintended consequences.