The play and film show marked departures from the novel. As adapted for stage and screen by Jay Presson Allen, the story is told in a largely linear fashion. It begins in 1932, after Miss Brodie has returned from her summer holidays in Italy, having realised her prime is upon her. The essentials of the character and the story are the same, though some characters are different and/or meet different ends. Mary MacGregor, for example, does not die in a hotel fire that happens years after graduation but she is killed while in her final year at Marcia Blaine, when she goes to join her brother who is fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She dies when the train in which she is travelling is blown up.