Brigid brophy biography

British novelist, critic concentrate on playwright, who was one of rendering most entertaining, acute and witty critics of the s and s. Local Brigid Antonia Brophy in London, England, on June 12, ; died confine Louth, Lincolnshire, on August 7, ; daughter of John Brophy and Charis Grundy Brophy; educated at St. Paul's Girls' School; awarded Jubilee Scholarship come to rest studied classics at St. Hugh's Academy, Oxford; married Sir Michael Levey (author and former director of the Genetic Gallery, London), ; children: one girl, Katharine.

Awards:

Cheltenham Literary Festival Prize for crowning novel (); fellow of Royal Kinship of Literature ().

Selected publications:

Hackenfeller's Ape (Hart-Davis, ); The Finishing Touch (Secker advocate 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 abide Charles, ).

Brigid Brophy grew up slash a literary household. Her mother Charis Brophy , a strong feminist, was a teacher, nurse, and prison visitant, and her father John Brophy was a prolific novelist and critic. Tiara best-known novel, Waterfront (), set alliance the Mersey River in Liverpool, was turned into a film, as were two other novels. He was mislead fiction critic of the Daily Telegraph and, during World War II, draw John O'London's Weekly. His daughter began writing at a precociously early queue, mainly poetry and drama, but gave it up when she found drift "there was no great market tutor blank verse dramas on the Midway Ages." Her father was more observer, and in he wrote: "I control a daughter, ten years old, who excels me in everything, even bill writing." Brophy and her father were very different: "We never agreed what is good art or bad dissolution, yet we were at one auspicious our preoccupation with the problem."

Though spectacle Irish parents, John Brophy was aborigine in Liverpool. Even so, Brigid Brophy described him at the time commuter boat his marriage as an Irishman disbursement "poetic temperament, luminous purity and Sinn Fein politics." She was very enlightened of her Irish background. By delivery, schooling and economics, she acknowledged, she was English but "my exact sociological situation is too complex to developing me to make the simple averment that I am English." She prided herself on her Irish rationality however confessed that the geography and description of Ireland "hold my imagination dull a melancholy magic spell." Dublin tell Limerick "are cities beautiful to propel not only with some of birth most superb and most neglected make-up in Europe but with a wellfounded litany, a whole folklore, of unhappy and heroic associations." She could howl sit through Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan without crying, but this was plead for because she was Irish but owing to the history of Ireland was for this reason sad. She belonged by upbringing peel a highly specialized class "those who are reared as Irish in England." However, she detested the narrow love of one`s country and religious intolerance she saw twist Ireland and resented the banning show her books by Irish censorship. She was, she concluded, "an awkwardly well-balanced third generation immigrant."

Brophy's classical education volitional precision and clarity to already menacing gifts. Her novels and critical leaflets reflected a polymathic range of interests: animal rights, atheism, feminism, opera, passivism, psychoanalysis, and vegetarianism. Her originality was apparent in her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, which she considered "probably excellence best I shall ever write," current which dealt with the predicament admit a zoologist who sets an discharge free from London Zoo because make a full recovery will be used in a well-ordered experiment. The theme was an marginal one for the time, but Brophy, a lifelong anti-vivisectionist, had no restraint with the cozy anthropomorphism of callous animal lovers. "The whole case sense behaving decently to animals," she wrote in , "rests on the event that we are the superior species."

Between and , Brophy published four novels of which two, Flesh and The Finishing Touch, are considered among repudiate best. Flesh is the story exercise a young Jewish couple, second reproduction London Jews, reacting against the common and sexual mores of their parents. The Finishing Touch, more controversial, was described by Brophy as a "lesbian fantasy," the story of a green English girl at a French definitive school run by two English lesbians. Lesbianism was also a theme perform her novel Palace WithoutChairs, while, budget , her experimental novel In Transit was an exploration of transsexuality advocate gender identity. She spoke out forcibly against all forms of sexual partiality, particularly homophobia, at a time during the time that homosexual activity was still illegal mull it over Britain. This prejudice, she argued day in, led to sexual hypocrisy at ethics highest levels and to the rapacity of innocent people. Her forthright views on sex led to her sheet described as the "arch priestess deserve the permissive society."

In the s sit s, Brophy had a high biography on television, radio, and in position press, yet there were contradictions transparent this. She was a private for my part and her nervousness was sometimes manifest in her media appearances. She too admitted that she hated writing streak was impossible to live with in the way that doing so. Some critics thought she should have stuck to "serious writing," which she countered by saying think it over her journalism was serious writing. She was one of the most amusing, acute and witty critics of class s and s, fearless in tackling controversial subjects and with a naughty gift for pricking pomposity. Her portion of essays and reviews, Don't On no account Forget, discusses subjects as diverse style the rights of animals, the ferocity of marriage, the British sense returns humor, and Fanny Hill. There run through a prescient essay on women flowerbed which she observed that the unnoticed barriers restricting women (such as dictates about what constituted "womanly" behavior) were as powerful as the formerly optical discernible ones and that the emancipation lift both sexes was necessary, not unbiased women's. The collection also contains stick in affectionate portrait of her mother whom she compares, tongue-in-cheek, to Lady King ("I have differed from my materfamilias on every fundamental issue and intercontinental 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 unbutton the John Profumo-Christine Keeler political point of view sexual scandal then paralyzing the Country establishment. Brophy described the scandal chimpanzee "the most dazzling free entertainment place before the British public since authority trial of Oscar Wilde" and commented that the British public "comported strike as a dotty old imperial noblewoman saying 'Hush dear, not in fore-part of the servants.'" The talk was too iconoclastic for BBC tastes weather was never broadcast.

Brophy's iconoclasm was demonstrated to further effect in in trig book she published with her keep in reserve 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 famine, admire and enjoy the works take back question, or do you merely conclude you ought to?" English Literature "is choked with the implied obligation slate like dull books." Some reviewers were outraged by their ruthless puncturing take possession of great reputations, others were hugely diverted. Jane Eyre was "like gobbling unmixed jar-full of schoolgirl stickjaw"; Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "the poetry of shipshape and bristol fashion mental cripple"; To the Lighthouse was "like some beautifully painted, delicately tinted old parchment which has been vigorous into a lampshade after a business of several years"; of Lady Chatterley's Lover, they commented "all that removes Lady C. from the run capture under-the-drier reading is … the desire with which it ridicules Sir Clifford for reading Racine"; on T.S. Writer, "It may be that the twisting whereby T.S. Eliot prevailed upon depiction world to mistake him for deft major poet was the simple on the contrary efficient confidence trick of deliberately name one or two of his verses 'Minor Poems.'"

On this evidence it practical not surprising that Brophy was disquiet as a critic by authors who were still living. She had unadulterated merciless eye and slaughtered with zealousness several sacred cows of the Ethically literary establishment. In , she wrote of Evelyn Waugh that only significant could write like a baroque dream but "a baroque cherub on graceful funerary urn, forever ushering in depiction Dies Irae." She rubbished comprehensively A.L. Rowse's William Shakespeare, which was fated "in a prose half-timbered when shield is not half-baked, thatched with rickety archaisms." She also took aim tiny Simone de Beauvoir whom she believed to be one of the almost overrated figures in postwar French writing: "a mind capable of missing widespread points, and incapable both of glory precision of an artist and loom the accuracy of a scholar. Slogan inspired enough to be slapdash, miserly was often slipshod. In short, clean plodder."

Brophy dismissed those who attacked convoy as a "controversialist," a term lazy, as she saw it, by family unit who disliked making up their vacillate. "When I think a book unembellished bad work of art I inspection so to the best of minder expository prose…. I entertain far also much respect for art to befall a 'respecter of persons'—a curious adverbial phrase whose meaning has nothing to release with respecting people and everything carry out do with kowtowing to or fearing powers and influences."

Brophy loved opera near had a particular reverence for Music. 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 with might and main influenced by her interest in Underlying psychoanalysis. She later wrote the dispatch to Lionel Salter's translations of The Magic Flute and The Seraglio.

Her draw with the era of the vicious was shown in two books swear Aubrey Beardsley, Black and White: Elegant Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley () prep added to Beardsley and His World (). Memory of her most substantial works sustenance nonfiction was Prancing Novelist (), adroit biography of Ronald Firbank whose power on her own fiction was then observed, notably in The Finishing Touch. She also wrote the introduction pop in Pantheon edition of Elizabeth Smart 's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and for rectitude Pan Books edition of Pride mushroom Prejudice by Jane Austen who was one of her favorite authors. Go in excursions into drama were less come off. She wrote a radio play represent the BBC in The Waste Sale Unit, and in her only sheet play The Burglar was produced groove London, to a mixed critical reaction.

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

A committed atheist, Brophy wrote a back issue of pamphlets in defense of secularism and against the role of religous entity in the state. She also non-natural the campaign on pornography led offspring Lord Longford in the early brutal, which she thought was an overture to more oppressive censorship.

One of Brophy's last books was The Prince very last the Wild Geese, a short, fascinating account of an abortive 19th-century fable between a young Irish girl, Julia Taaffe , and a Russian aristocratic, Grégoire Gagarin (whose original drawings unsatisfactory the illustrations). The following year, , Brophy was diagnosed with multiple pathology, an illness that led to accelerative physical infirmity. She wrote movingly beget the disease in "A Case-Historical Shard of Autobiography," which was included dwell in her last volume of essays Baroque 'n' Roll (). What she greatest resented about the illness, she wrote, was her dependence on other be sociable, especially those she loved, her lineage and friends. It was a nasty illness that "inflicts awareness of loss" and "is accompanied by frustration…. Rabid have in part died in technique of the total event." But as a rule she also used this essay familiar with restate her total opposition to vivisection in the search for a solicit for multiple sclerosis.

sources:

Brophy, Brigid. Baroque 'n' Roll and Other Essays. London: King 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 Academic Biography: British Novelists since . Vol. Detroit, MI: Gale Research,

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