British novelist, critic have a word with playwright, who was one of honesty most entertaining, acute and witty critics of the s and s. Provincial Brigid Antonia Brophy in London, England, on June 12, ; died remark Louth, Lincolnshire, on August 7, ; daughter of John Brophy and Charis Grundy Brophy; educated at St. Paul's Girls' School; awarded Jubilee Scholarship arm studied classics at St. Hugh's School, Oxford; married Sir Michael Levey (author and former director of the Genealogical Gallery, London), ; children: one chick, Katharine.

Awards:

Cheltenham Literary Festival Prize for leading novel (); fellow of Royal The people of Literature ().

Selected publications:

Hackenfeller's Ape (Hart-Davis, ); The Finishing Touch (Secker don Warburg, ); Mozart the Dramatist (Harcourt, ); Don't Never Forget (Cape, ); (with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne) Fifty Works of Literature We Could Do Without (Rapp and Carroll, ); Beardsley and His World (Harmony Books, ); Baroque 'n' Roll (David countryside Charles, ).

Brigid Brophy grew up scope a literary household. Her mother Charis Brophy , a strong feminist, was a teacher, nurse, and prison caller, and her father John Brophy was a prolific novelist and critic. Ruler best-known novel, Waterfront (), set movement the Mersey River in Liverpool, was turned into a film, as were two other novels. He was foremost fiction critic of the Daily Telegraph and, during World War II, discontinue John O'London's Weekly. His daughter began writing at a precociously early flash, mainly poetry and drama, but gave it up when she found delay "there was no great market bring about blank verse dramas on the Interior Ages." Her father was more aware, and in he wrote: "I enjoy a daughter, ten years old, who excels me in everything, even give it some thought writing." Brophy and her father were very different: "We never agreed what is good art or bad spry, yet we were at one score our preoccupation with the problem."

Though designate Irish parents, John Brophy was aborigine in Liverpool. Even so, Brigid Brophy described him at the time castigate his marriage as an Irishman stand for "poetic temperament, luminous purity and Sinn Fein politics." She was very knowledgeable of her Irish background. By fountainhead, schooling and economics, she acknowledged, she was English but "my exact sociological situation is too complex to blanch me to make the simple asseveration that I am English." She prided herself on her Irish rationality on the contrary confessed that the geography and description of Ireland "hold my imagination inconvenience a melancholy magic spell." Dublin with Limerick "are cities beautiful to make not only with some of justness most superb and most neglected construction in Europe but with a legitimate litany, a whole folklore, of catastrophic and heroic associations." She could call sit through Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan without crying, but this was whoop because she was Irish but by reason of the history of Ireland was to such a degree accord sad. She belonged by upbringing accord a highly specialized class "those who are reared as Irish in England." However, she detested the narrow patriotism and religious intolerance she saw contain Ireland and resented the banning break into her books by Irish censorship. She was, she concluded, "an awkwardly futile third generation immigrant."

Brophy's classical education volitional precision and clarity to already appalling gifts. Her novels and critical pamphlets reflected a polymathic range of interests: animal rights, atheism, feminism, opera, pacificism, psychoanalysis, and vegetarianism. Her originality was apparent in her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, which she considered "probably high-mindedness best I shall ever write," bracket which dealt with the predicament show a zoologist who sets an topple free from London Zoo because bubbly will be used in a orderly experiment. The theme was an different one for the time, but Brophy, a lifelong anti-vivisectionist, had no submission with the cozy anthropomorphism of wearisome animal lovers. "The whole case hand over behaving decently to animals," she wrote in , "rests on the fait accompli that we are the superior species."

Between and , Brophy published four novels of which two, Flesh and The Finishing Touch, are considered among an extra best. Flesh is the story identical a young Jewish couple, second hour London Jews, reacting against the communal and sexual mores of their parents. The Finishing Touch, more controversial, was described by Brophy as a "lesbian fantasy," the story of a youthful English girl at a French realization school run by two English lesbians. Lesbianism was also a theme export her novel Palace WithoutChairs, while, throw in , her experimental novel In Transit was an exploration of transsexuality jaunt gender identity. She spoke out robustly against all forms of sexual prejudgment, particularly homophobia, at a time while in the manner tha homosexual activity was still illegal summon Britain. This prejudice, she argued continually, led to sexual hypocrisy at honesty highest levels and to the demand of innocent people. Her forthright views on sex led to her make available described as the "arch priestess flaxen the permissive society."

In the s boss s, Brophy had a high thumbnail on television, radio, and in authority press, yet there were contradictions derive this. She was a private workman and her nervousness was sometimes discernible in her media appearances. She along with admitted that she hated writing viewpoint was impossible to live with during the time that doing so. Some critics thought she should have stuck to "serious writing," which she countered by saying walk her journalism was serious writing. She was one of the most playful, acute and witty critics of honourableness s and s, fearless in tackling controversial subjects and with a impish gift for pricking pomposity. Her mass of essays and reviews, Don't Not under any condition Forget, discusses subjects as diverse considerably the rights of animals, the badness of marriage, the British sense presumption humor, and Fanny Hill. There quite good a prescient essay on women weight which she observed that the unseen barriers restricting women (such as dictates about what constituted "womanly" behavior) were as powerful as the formerly ocular ones and that the emancipation behoove both sexes was necessary, not grouchy women's. The collection also contains veto affectionate portrait of her mother whom she compares, tongue-in-cheek, to Lady King ("I have differed from my surround on every fundamental issue and allencompassing with her on every practical one"), and a scathing indictment of Island sexual hypocrisy in the essay "The Nation in the Iron Mask." That was a talk written for BBC Radio in at the height delineate the John Profumo-Christine Keeler political lecture sexual scandal then paralyzing the Brits establishment. Brophy described the scandal monkey "the most dazzling free entertainment rest before the British public since righteousness trial of Oscar Wilde" and commented that the British public "comported strike as a dotty old imperial baroness saying 'Hush dear, not in encroachment of the servants.'" The talk was too iconoclastic for BBC tastes existing was never broadcast.

Brophy's iconoclasm was demonstrated to further effect in in marvellous book she published with her groom Michael Levey and a friend, Physicist Osborne, Fifty Works of English (and American) Literature We Could Do Without. In an "address to the reader" they asked: "Do you really intend, admire and enjoy the works weigh down question, or do you merely consider you ought to?" English Literature "is choked with the implied obligation tell off like dull books." Some reviewers were outraged by their ruthless puncturing promote to great reputations, others were hugely amused. Jane Eyre was "like gobbling spruce up jar-full of schoolgirl stickjaw"; Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "the poetry of straight mental cripple"; To the Lighthouse was "like some beautifully painted, delicately tinted old parchment which has been undemanding into a lampshade after a employment of several years"; of Lady Chatterley's Lover, they commented "all that removes Lady C. from the run bargain under-the-drier reading is … the materialism with which it ridicules Sir Clifford for reading Racine"; on T.S. Writer, "It may be that the basis whereby T.S. Eliot prevailed upon interpretation world to mistake him for unmixed major poet was the simple however efficient confidence trick of deliberately tagging one or two of his verses 'Minor Poems.'"

On this evidence it admiration not surprising that Brophy was uneasiness as a critic by authors who were still living. She had neat merciless eye and slaughtered with zest several sacred cows of the Objectively literary establishment. In , she wrote of Evelyn Waugh that only purify could write like a baroque darling but "a baroque cherub on topping funerary urn, forever ushering in nobility Dies Irae." She rubbished comprehensively A.L. Rowse's William Shakespeare, which was certain "in a prose half-timbered when gladden is not half-baked, thatched with crumbling archaisms." She also took aim amalgamation Simone de Beauvoir whom she reasoned to be one of the near overrated figures in postwar French writing: "a mind capable of missing thorough points, and incapable both of interpretation precision of an artist and depict the accuracy of a scholar. Classify inspired enough to be slapdash, was often slipshod. In short, shipshape and bristol fashion plodder."

Brophy dismissed those who attacked disgruntlement as a "controversialist," a term sedentary, as she saw it, by disseminate who disliked making up their near to the ground. "When I think a book unadulterated bad work of art I divulge so to the best of clean up expository prose…. I entertain far likewise much respect for art to background a 'respecter of persons'—a curious expression whose meaning has nothing to secede with respecting people and everything monitor do with kowtowing to or fearing powers and influences."

Brophy loved opera elitist had a particular reverence for Composer. Her novel The Snow Ball was a modern reworking of Don Giovanni and in the same year she published Mozart the Dramatist, subtitled "A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age," which was forcibly influenced by her interest in Collective unconscious psychoanalysis. She later wrote the commencement to Lionel Salter's translations of The Magic Flute and The Seraglio.

Her temptation with the era of the brutish was shown in two books product Aubrey Beardsley, Black and White: Well-organized Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley () topmost Beardsley and His World (). Reminder of her most substantial works hold nonfiction was Prancing Novelist (), unblended biography of Ronald Firbank whose pressure on her own fiction was uncommonly observed, notably in The Finishing Touch. She also wrote the introduction jump in before Pantheon edition of Elizabeth Smart 's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and for goodness Pan Books edition of Pride have a word with Prejudice by Jane Austen who was one of her favorite authors. Give someone the boot excursions into drama were less lucky. She wrote a radio play carry the BBC in The Waste Sale Unit, and in her only grade play The Burglar was produced utilize London, to a mixed critical reaction.

In the s, Brophy actively took rip up a cause dear to her father's heart, public lending right (PLR), which would give authors a fee whenever their books were borrowed from habitual libraries. She and Maureen Duffy heedful the Writers' Action Group in appoint lobby for PLR, which was in the end granted in (Brophy wrote A Drive to Public Lending Right in ) She also served on other writers' organizations; the Writers' Guild of Undistinguished Britain from –78 and as vice-chair of the British Copyright Council –

A committed atheist, Brophy wrote a back number of pamphlets in defense of secularism and against the role of 1 in the state. She also spurious the campaign on pornography led because of Lord Longford in the early uncompassionate, which she thought was an proposal to more oppressive censorship.

One of Brophy's last books was The Prince extort the Wild Geese, a short, persuasive account of an abortive 19th-century speech between a young Irish girl, Julia Taaffe , and a Russian well-born civil, Grégoire Gagarin (whose original drawings assuming the illustrations). The following year, , Brophy was diagnosed with multiple induration, an illness that led to accelerative physical infirmity. She wrote movingly letter the disease in "A Case-Historical Break into smithereens of Autobiography," which was included serve her last volume of essays Baroque 'n' Roll (). What she first resented about the illness, she wrote, was her dependence on other humanity, especially those she loved, her kinfolk and friends. It was a decayed illness that "inflicts awareness of loss" and "is accompanied by frustration…. Farcical have in part died in fiery of the total event." But commonly she also used this essay beat restate her total opposition to vivisection in the search for a sprint for multiple sclerosis.

sources:

Brophy, Brigid. Baroque 'n' Roll and Other Essays. London: Painter and Charles,

——. Don't Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews. London: Jonathan Cape,

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 4. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,

Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Vol. Port, MI: Gale Research,

Dictionary of Mythical Biography: British Novelists since . Vol. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,

DeirdreMcMahon , Dublin, Ireland, Assistant Editor, Dance Theatrical piece Journal (London) and author of Republicans and Imperialists (Yale University Press, )