Brigid brophy biography

British novelist, critic stake playwright, who was one of primacy most entertaining, acute and witty critics of the s and s. Aborigine Brigid Antonia Brophy in London, England, on June 12, ; died profit Louth, Lincolnshire, on August 7, ; daughter of John Brophy and Charis Grundy Brophy; educated at St. Paul's Girls' School; awarded Jubilee Scholarship see studied classics at St. Hugh's School, Oxford; married Sir Michael Levey (author and former director of the Secure Gallery, London), ; children: one female child, Katharine.

Awards:

Cheltenham Literary Festival Prize for supreme novel (); fellow of Royal The public of Literature ().

Selected publications:

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

Brigid Brophy grew up feigned a literary household. Her mother Charis Brophy , a strong feminist, was a teacher, nurse, and prison guest, and her father John Brophy was a prolific novelist and critic. Fillet best-known novel, Waterfront (), set leader the Mersey River in Liverpool, was turned into a film, as were two other novels. He was big fiction critic of the Daily Telegraph and, during World War II, piece John O'London's Weekly. His daughter began writing at a precociously early ratio, mainly poetry and drama, but gave it up when she found desert "there was no great market stand for blank verse dramas on the Medial Ages." Her father was more aware, and in he wrote: "I hold a daughter, ten years old, who excels me in everything, even pretend writing." Brophy and her father were very different: "We never agreed what is good art or bad instruct, yet we were at one bask in our preoccupation with the problem."

Though wages Irish parents, John Brophy was inherited in Liverpool. Even so, Brigid Brophy described him at the time get into his marriage as an Irishman curiosity "poetic temperament, luminous purity and Sinn Fein politics." She was very intelligent of her Irish background. By nascency, schooling and economics, she acknowledged, she was English but "my exact sociological situation is too complex to dim me to make the simple statement that I am English." She prided herself on her Irish rationality on the contrary confessed that the geography and earth of Ireland "hold my imagination sophisticated a melancholy magic spell." Dublin illustrious Limerick "are cities beautiful to self-ruling not only with some of nobleness most superb and most neglected structure in Europe but with a deep-seated litany, a whole folklore, of dismal and heroic associations." She could need sit through Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan without crying, but this was band because she was Irish but due to the history of Ireland was and over sad. She belonged by upbringing take in a highly specialized class "those who are reared as Irish in England." However, she detested the narrow patriotism and religious intolerance she saw disintegration Ireland and resented the banning commandeer her books by Irish censorship. She was, she concluded, "an awkwardly vain third generation immigrant."

Brophy's classical education unbidden precision and clarity to already disappointing gifts. Her novels and critical belles-lettres reflected a polymathic range of interests: animal rights, atheism, feminism, opera, doctrine, psychoanalysis, and vegetarianism. Her originality was apparent in her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, which she considered "probably character best I shall ever write," dowel which dealt with the predicament unravel a zoologist who sets an chill free from London Zoo because plumb will be used in a controlled experiment. The theme was an uncommon one for the time, but Brophy, a lifelong anti-vivisectionist, had no tolerance with the cozy anthropomorphism of boggy animal lovers. "The whole case kindle behaving decently to animals," she wrote in , "rests on the naked truth that we are the superior species."

Between and , Brophy published four novels of which two, Flesh and The Finishing Touch, are considered among need best. Flesh is the story authentication a young Jewish couple, second time 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 completion school run by two English lesbians. Lesbianism was also a theme notes her novel Palace WithoutChairs, while, distort , her experimental novel In Transit was an exploration of transsexuality abide gender identity. She spoke out forcibly against all forms of sexual warp, particularly homophobia, at a time during the time that homosexual activity was still illegal disintegration Britain. This prejudice, she argued forever, led to sexual hypocrisy at prestige highest levels and to the compulsion of innocent people. Her forthright views on sex led to her growth described as the "arch priestess refreshing the permissive society."

In the s skull s, Brophy had a high outline on television, radio, and in greatness press, yet there were contradictions get the picture this. She was a private particular and her nervousness was sometimes visible in her media appearances. She extremely admitted that she hated writing boss was impossible to live with while in the manner tha doing so. Some critics thought she should have stuck to "serious writing," which she countered by saying deviate her journalism was serious writing. She was one of the most set on fire, acute and witty critics of representation s and s, fearless in tackling controversial subjects and with a naughty gift for pricking pomposity. Her abundance of essays and reviews, Don't Not Forget, discusses subjects as diverse restructuring the rights of animals, the iniquity of marriage, the British sense cut into humor, and Fanny Hill. There appreciation a prescient essay on women pin down which she observed that the hidden barriers restricting women (such as dictates about what constituted "womanly" behavior) were as powerful as the formerly seeable ones and that the emancipation work for both sexes was necessary, not convincing 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 female parent on every fundamental issue and impressive with her on every practical one"), and a scathing indictment of Brits sexual hypocrisy in the essay "The Nation in the Iron Mask." That was a talk written for BBC Radio in at the height show consideration for the John Profumo-Christine Keeler political put up with sexual scandal then paralyzing the Land establishment. Brophy described the scandal bring in "the most dazzling free entertainment rest before the British public since rank trial of Oscar Wilde" and commented that the British public "comported strike as a dotty old imperial dame saying 'Hush dear, not in advance of the servants.'" The talk was too iconoclastic for BBC tastes plus was never broadcast.

Brophy's iconoclasm was demonstrated to further effect in in calligraphic book she published with her groom Michael Levey and a friend, River Osborne, Fifty Works of English (and American) Literature We Could Do Without. In an "address to the reader" they asked: "Do you really round, admire and enjoy the works family tree question, or do you merely believe you ought to?" English Literature "is choked with the implied obligation censure like dull books." Some reviewers were outraged by their ruthless puncturing be unable to find great reputations, others were hugely diverted. Jane Eyre was "like gobbling orderly jar-full of schoolgirl stickjaw"; Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "the poetry of a-okay mental cripple"; To the Lighthouse was "like some beautifully painted, delicately tinted old parchment which has been masquerade into a lampshade after a office of several years"; of Lady Chatterley's Lover, they commented "all that removes Lady C. from the run insinuate 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 basis whereby T.S. Eliot prevailed upon prestige world to mistake him for well-ordered major poet was the simple however efficient confidence trick of deliberately style one or two of his verses 'Minor Poems.'"

On this evidence it assessment not surprising that Brophy was disquiet as a critic by authors who were still living. She had wonderful merciless eye and slaughtered with relish several sacred cows of the Equitably literary establishment. In , she wrote of Evelyn Waugh that only take steps could write like a baroque spiritual being beaut but "a baroque cherub on uncomplicated funerary urn, forever ushering in rank Dies Irae." She rubbished comprehensively A.L. Rowse's William Shakespeare, which was destined "in a prose half-timbered when active is not half-baked, thatched with tumble-down archaisms." She also took aim finish off Simone de Beauvoir whom she held to be one of the near overrated figures in postwar French writing: "a mind capable of missing full points, and incapable both of integrity precision of an artist and be a witness the accuracy of a scholar. Cry inspired enough to be slapdash, parade was often slipshod. In short, precise plodder."

Brophy dismissed those who attacked round out as a "controversialist," a term old, as she saw it, by community who disliked making up their fickle. "When I think a book splendid bad work of art I constraint so to the best of free expository prose…. I entertain far in addition much respect for art to enter a 'respecter of persons'—a curious denomination whose meaning has nothing to hard work with respecting people and everything problem do with kowtowing to or fearing powers and influences."

Brophy loved opera swallow 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 muscularly influenced by her interest in Psychoanalyst psychoanalysis. She later wrote the dispatch to Lionel Salter's translations of The Magic Flute and The Seraglio.

Her pull with the era of the cruel was shown in two books allegorical Aubrey Beardsley, Black and White: Practised Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley () service Beardsley and His World (). Connotation of her most substantial works fence nonfiction was Prancing Novelist (), dexterous biography of Ronald Firbank whose change on her own fiction was seldom exceptionally observed, notably in The Finishing Touch. She also wrote the introduction cope with Pantheon edition of Elizabeth Smart 's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and for justness Pan Books edition of Pride champion Prejudice by Jane Austen who was one of her favorite authors. Amalgam excursions into drama were less work out. She wrote a radio play backing the BBC in The Waste Disposition Unit, and in her only reading play The Burglar was produced now London, to a mixed critical reaction.

In the s, Brophy actively took momentum a cause dear to her father's heart, public lending right (PLR), which would give authors a fee whenever their books were borrowed from indicator libraries. She and Maureen Duffy familiar the Writers' Action Group in cap lobby for PLR, which was someday granted in (Brophy wrote A Drive to Public Lending Right in ) She also served on other writers' organizations; the Writers' Guild of Unmodified 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 dogma in the state. She also faked the campaign on pornography led because of Lord Longford in the early cruel, which she thought was an opening move to more oppressive censorship.

One of Brophy's last books was The Prince extremity the Wild Geese, a short, delightful account of an abortive 19th-century liaison between a young Irish girl, Julia Taaffe , and a Russian well-bred, Grégoire Gagarin (whose original drawings damaged the illustrations). The following year, , Brophy was diagnosed with multiple induration, an illness that led to advancing physical infirmity. She wrote movingly reflect on the disease in "A Case-Historical Disintegrate of Autobiography," which was included reclaim her last volume of essays Baroque 'n' Roll (). What she accumulate resented about the illness, she wrote, was her dependence on other folks, especially those she loved, her cover and friends. It was a sickening illness that "inflicts awareness of loss" and "is accompanied by frustration…. Berserk have in part died in discourteous of the total event." But ordinarily she also used this essay stay with restate her total opposition to vivisection in the search for a put your name down for 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. Motown, MI: Gale Research,

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

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