A liberated young schoolteacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the period between the two world wars, instructs her girls on the ways of life. Ignoring the more mundane subjects, she teaches them of love, politics and art. Her affairs with two male teachers become known and she finds herself fighting to keep her job. She believes that she can always count on the one hundred percent support of her favorite pupils, but one of them does not feel that Miss Jean Brodie (Dame Maggie Smith) is in her "prime" anymore. No longer swayed by her teacher's eloquence, she begins to learn about life and love herself.