The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie includes several scenes in which characters interact playfully with imaginary characters or scenarios, from literary texts to their imagined ideas about what real, historical people might have been like. This interweaving of fiction and reality allows the text to question the nature of existence and perception as well as foreground the mechanics of the creative process: Miss Brodie is skillfully weaving a narrative world for her chosen students to inhabit—one in which they view themselves as characters in a drama, each with her own role to play.

An early example of this interplay between reality and fiction is Sandy’s imaginative engagement with “The Lady of Shalott,” a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As the students read the poem in class, Sandy asks the Lady of Shalott how the Lady was able to write her name on her boat, as depicted in the poem. The Lady tells her that “some heedless member of the Unemployed” left a pot of paint by the riverbank; she then places her hand on Sandy’s shoulder and bemoans the fate of “one so young and beautiful,” who will be “so ill-fated in love” (20). Sandy reacts so strongly to her own imaginative interaction that Miss Brodie notices, asking Sandy if she is in pain (21).