Obituary: Maisie Shaw, one of the last "Brodie Girls" ONE of the last of the "Brodie girls" has died in Edinburgh, aged 93. Maisie Shaw, a schoolgirl protégé of Christina Kay at James Gillespie's High School - made world famous in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - was later to become the wife of the eminent Scottish artist Sax Shaw for more than 50 years. Born Mary Mallinson in Edinburgh to a science teacher and his wife, Maisie would catch the bus across town to school in the 1930s from the family bungalow in Corstorphine. Her talents in art and writing were evident from an early age, and she came to rival her classmate Muriel Camberg in bagging the school poetry prizes. Both girls were members of the "crème de la crème," the favoured pupils of the inspirational, unorthodox Miss Kay; it was a wholly Edinburgh-flavoured middle-class scene which would later be memorialised by Camberg (who married a Sidney Spark) in her celebrated novel. While acknowledging Miss Kay's affection for Mussolini (not to mention the political circumstances that encouraged the Italian trains to run on time), Maisie remembered the maverick teacher fondly to the end of her life. She recently recalled with satisfaction how, having - with characteristic determination - begged the autograph of the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev during a visit to Edinburgh by the Ballets Russes, she had presented the treasured item to Miss Kay. It was a gift that brought the beloved teacher to tears. Maisie's own life would embrace the creative passions nurtured through her inspirational schooling. Her interest in illustration and book production took her to Edinburgh College of Art, where she published her own book of illustrated poems. Here too, in 1939, she met a young Yorkshireman of prodigious gifts, Sax Shaw. The courtship held its challenges; Shaw was often away, first as a wartime conscientious objector exiled to farm work in the Borders and then as a scholarship student in Paris. In-between times they would work together on the costumes and sets for The Horses, a 1946 ballet by Marjory Middleton. At the end of the war, they were finally married. Maisie had trained as a teacher at Moray House - and while Sax embarked on a career that would include a revolutionary directorship of the Dovecote tapestry studios, works in churches and other buildings all over the world and a long-running tenure at the Edinburgh College of Art, Maisie started work as an art supply teacher. Her postings took her into some of Edinburgh's toughest and far-flung schools, and she loved her raucous classes. As she liked to put it, she had "a healthy pair of lungs." Meanwhile, in a New Town flat once defined as the frontier of Edinburgh's bohemia by a local paper, which labelled it "the house where Stockbridge begins," the couple entertained art students past and present, distinguished cultural figures, musicians, writers and a constant influx of new friends who were seduced by the colourful scene on the doorstep. Here among the whirl of tapestries and stained glass, musical instruments and simmering pots you might run into the flamenco guitarist Marcos or the mercurial film-maker Jack Shea, the writer Bryan Appleyard or the painter Robin Philipson. Billy Connolly borrowed the banjo that had belonged to Maisie's father, and there were several fractious phone calls before the instrument was returned. And if Maisie's own work became secondary as she raised a family, she was never anything but staunch in buoying up the household through the professional and personal difficulties of Sax's sometimes turbulent creative life. Central, too, in her affections were two sons, Kevan and Christian, who would one day become prominent in their own artistic fields of lighting design and stained glass. Then there were much-loved grandchildren, Felicity and Andrew, and this year a great-grandson, Dylan. Widowed 12 years ago, Maisie retained her irrepressible verve. She was at the city's Whitespace gallery in September for the opening of a memorial exhibition of Sax's work, and found a work of her own hanging next to the typically fanciful menagerie of Shaw's watercolour Sadie's Dream. Long ago, it had been her retort to her husband's picture. Maisie's delicate, figurative pencil drawing is simply titled: A Proper Rabbit.