Three remarkable books were published in 1961, each of which in a different way had something striking to communicate about the place of the Scottish Enlightenment in the country's cultural history. Muriel Spark's novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has a key scene where the eponymous schoolteacher guides her middle-class pupils through the insalubrious Grassmarket area of 1930s Edinburgh. Counterpointing the grimness of depression-era poverty, and implicitly also the Scottish nationalism of that decade, Brodie reminds her girls brightly that they are ‘European’ and that as Edinburghers they ‘owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.’ Partly this pro-European stance connects with Brodie's relish for the ‘gay French Queen’, Mary Queen of Scots, and her hatred for Mary's adversary, fiery apostle of the Reformation, John Knox. It relates too, however, to the pull Brodie felt towards European Fascism, and particularly her admiration for the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, and it also derives from her conception of ‘Edinburgh [as] a European capital, the city of Hume and Boswell’. The discerning reader notes conflicting European currents in the Brodie world view: rebarbative totalitarianism (Knox as well as Mussolini, on the one hand), and freer cosmopolitan intellectual energies on the other (Mary as well as major eighteenth-century Edinburgh writers). Clearly, in espousing each of these strains Brodie is a culturally confused character – or, alternatively in a meta-reading, a suitably reliable, erratic compass. Her creator's point is that Scottish like European culture is ambivalent and contestable, deflating and inspiring, unsettled in general. Brodie, like Scotland the nation – the novel makes clear – has elements in her of both the autocratic indigenous Calvinist, Knox, and the Romantic European, Mary. Much of this character-terrain is of course stereotypical and Spark herself knows it, her stock-in-trade as a writer being to twist, mangle and recycle quotidian clichés, often making the reader work hard in determining which perspective, if any, is reliable.

Spark's book is inspired to a large degree by James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which is in turn deeply indebted as a dark psychological character-study to the Scottish Enlightenment and the interest of David Hume and other historians in religious ‘fanaticism’. Also lurking in the background of Hogg's Gothic horror is Adam Smith's idea of ‘sympathy’ (in a very neutral sense), or putting oneself in the place of another.