A short life of the author
Brigid Antonia Brophy (12 June 1929 – 7 August 1995) was a British novelist, literary critic, biographer, and polemicist whose intellectually dazzling, sexually frank, and formally adventurous fiction — combined with her fierce public advocacy for animal rights, authors’ copyright protections, and bisexual liberation — made her one of the most provocative, original, and now unjustly neglected literary figures of postwar Britain. She was compared to Firbank, Peacock, and early Huxley, but her voice was entirely her own: erudite, witty, confrontational, and unapologetically cerebral.
Life
Brophy was born in London, the daughter of the novelist John Brophy. She won a Jubilee Scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, but was sent down (expelled) after four terms — the circumstances were never fully clarified, but sexual nonconformity and intellectual arrogance were involved. She married the art historian Michael Levey (later director of the National Gallery) in 1954.
She was openly bisexual from the 1960s onward — unusual and courageous for the period — and had a long affair with the novelist Maureen Duffy. She campaigned vigorously for animal rights (her pamphlet The Rights of Animals, published in the Sunday Times in 1965, anticipated Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation by a decade), for public lending right (the legal principle that authors should be paid when their books are borrowed from public libraries), and for vegetarianism.
In the 1980s, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which progressively robbed her of the ability to write, speak, and move. She died in 1995.
Fiction
Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953), her first novel, is a fable about a scientist at a London zoo who tries to save a rare ape from being sent into space on a rocket — an allegory of Cold War militarism, animal exploitation, and the powerlessness of rationality against institutional bureaucracy.
The King of a Rainy Country (1956) follows two young Londoners — a woman and a gay man — on a picaresque journey through 1950s Europe in search of a burlesque dancer they admired. It is one of the earliest British novels to depict homosexuality and bisexuality with warmth and matter-of-factness.
Flesh (1962) is a short, sharp novel about a young Jewish Londoner’s sexual awakening during a honeymoon in Greece — a comedy of desire, identity, and the clash between English repression and Mediterranean sensuality.
The Snow Ball (1964) — her most formally accomplished novel — is set at a New Year’s Eve fancy-dress ball where the guests have come dressed as characters from Mozart operas. The novel unfolds over a single night, with the characters’ erotic and intellectual intrigues mirroring the plots of Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro. It is a tour de force of structural ingenuity and cultural allusiveness.
In Transit (1969) is an experimental novel set in an airport transit lounge in which the narrator cannot determine their own sex. It anticipates queer theory and nonbinary identity by several decades, using puns, typographic experiments, and multilingual wordplay in a manner that owes something to Joyce and something to Firbank.
Criticism and Nonfiction
Mozart the Dramatist (1964) is a passionate, intellectually ambitious study of Mozart’s operas as dramatic works — not merely musical entertainments but profound explorations of human psychology and social relations. The book combines psychoanalytic reading (Brophy was deeply influenced by Freud) with musicological analysis and remains one of the best books on Mozart written by a non-specialist.
Black Ship to Hell (1962) is an even more ambitious work — a vast, Freudian analysis of human destructiveness, ranging from Greek tragedy to nuclear weapons, from the psychology of war to the aesthetics of aggression. It is brilliant, exhausting, and largely unread.
Critical Standing
Brophy has been almost entirely forgotten by the literary mainstream. Her novels are mostly out of print, and she appears in no standard histories of the postwar British novel. This neglect is partly the result of her combativeness — she made enemies freely — and partly the result of the difficulty of her later work. Recent feminist and queer scholarship has begun to recover her, and The King of a Rainy Country and The Snow Ball deserve far wider readerships than they currently have.
Collecting Brophy
Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953, Hart-Davis) in first edition brings £30–£100. The Snow Ball (1964, Secker & Warburg) brings £20–£60. In Transit (1969) brings £15–£50. Her nonfiction is inexpensive and easily found.