Brigid Brophy

Based on Wikipedia: Brigid Brophy

The Woman Who Wouldn't Shut Up

Every time you borrow a book from a British public library, a tiny payment goes to the author. This happens because Brigid Brophy refused to take no for an answer for seven years straight.

That single-minded persistence defined her entire life. Born in 1929, Brophy was a novelist, critic, and professional troublemaker who appeared constantly on British television and in newspapers throughout the 1960s and 70s. She championed animal rights before it was fashionable, defended homosexual equality when doing so took genuine courage, and wrote experimental fiction that still feels daring today. She was loud, sharp, uncompromising, and brilliant. She made enemies easily and didn't care.

Her novel In Transit, published in 1969, remains one of the most radical experiments in English fiction—a book set in an airport lounge where the protagonist has literally forgotten their own sex and spends the narrative trying to figure it out. It's dense with puns, allusions, and wordplay, a novel that treats language itself as slippery and unreliable. The book earned her the label of postmodern writer, though such categories meant little to someone as restless as Brophy.

A Precocious Beginning, Then Exile

Brophy came by her literary talents honestly. Her father, John Brophy, was himself a writer who stocked the house with books and encouraged his daughter to read George Bernard Shaw, John Milton, and Evelyn Waugh. Young Brigid absorbed it all. By fifteen, she had won a scholarship to Oxford University to study classics at St Hugh's College.

Then it all fell apart.

The university authorities asked her not to return after her fourth term. The exact reasons remained murky throughout her life—she would only sketch the outlines, mentioning frowned-upon sexual activity and drunkenness. Whatever happened, the rejection devastated her. Oxford in the late 1940s was still rigidly conventional, and a young woman who refused to conform to expectations was asking for trouble.

What followed was a period of psychological turmoil. Eventually Brophy found her footing, working as a shorthand typist and sharing a rented flat near London Zoo with a friend from her abbreviated Oxford days. The proximity to the zoo would prove significant: the sound of caged lions roaring at night haunted her, and her sympathy for captive animals would become one of her life's defining causes.

Love, Marriage, and Complexity

At a party, Brophy met Michael Levey, an art historian who would later become Director of the National Gallery. They married in 1954 and had a daughter, Katharine, three years later.

Their marriage was unconventional from the start. Both partners were free to pursue outside relationships. This wasn't a compromise or a failure—it was how they wanted to live. For years, Brophy maintained a complex romantic relationship with the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Later, she had a stable partnership with the writer Maureen Duffy.

The arrangement worked until it didn't. When Duffy abruptly ended their relationship in 1979, Brophy suffered a severe emotional crisis. She believed this trauma played some role in the walking difficulties she began experiencing shortly afterward. It took time before doctors diagnosed her condition: late-onset multiple sclerosis. She was in her fifties.

The disease progressed cruelly. Brophy had always been a punctilious correspondent and an indefatigable worker—someone who handled multiple projects simultaneously, firing off letters to newspapers, working on novels, researching non-fiction, all at once. As her mobility declined, she kept writing as long as she possibly could.

In 1987, Michael Levey resigned from his prestigious position as Director of the National Gallery to care for his wife. It was an extraordinary gesture, giving up one of the most important roles in British cultural life for the daily work of caregiving.

By 1991, Brophy needed full-time care and reluctantly left London for a nursing home in Lincolnshire, where her husband and daughter had moved. Levey visited every afternoon without fail until she died in 1995, aged sixty-six.

The Novels: From Captive Apes to Airport Lounges

Brophy published her first collection of short stories, The Crown Princess, in 1953 when she was in her early twenties. Critics admired it, but she later disowned the book entirely—a harsh judge of her own work from the very beginning.

That same year saw her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape. The book drew directly from those nights near London Zoo, listening to caged lions roar. The plot concerns a plan to send a captive ape into space as a scientific experiment and the attempt to prevent this from happening. It won first prize for a debut novel at the Cheltenham Literary Festival and established Brophy as a novelist to watch.

The King of a Rainy Country followed in 1956, tracing two young people searching for a girl one of them had loved at school. The novel is both funny and elegiac, and scholars consider it the closest Brophy came to autobiography.

Flesh in 1962 charts the transformation of an initially shy man named Marcus whose awakening impulses lead him to bodily excess. The Finishing Touch, published the next year, is a lighter work that plays on the airy, wispy dialogue of Ronald Firbank, a novelist Brophy championed when he was still undervalued. The book features a character based on the art historian Anthony Blunt—known to her husband from the art world—portrayed as a headmistress of a finishing school.

Brophy considered her next novel, The Snow Ball from 1964, a masterpiece. She was right. Set at a sumptuous costume ball on New Year's Eve, the novel draws inspiration from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, which Brophy considered the most perfect work of musical theater ever created. A reviewer for The Guardian called it "a swirling, sumptuous, sensual feast of a book." It's an account of seduction that revels in sensory detail, with dialogue both witty and profound.

In Transit: The Radical Experiment

Then came In Transit in 1969, the novel that pushed Brophy's experimental tendencies to their limit.

The entire book takes place in an airport departure lounge—that strange non-place between destinations where normal rules seem suspended. The protagonist has somehow "lost" their sex and spends the narrative trying to rediscover whether they're male or female. The question sounds like a simple one, but Brophy uses it to interrogate everything we assume about gender, identity, language, and meaning.

The text is dense with puns and allusions. Brophy plays with narrative consciousness itself, making the reader aware of how much our sense of self depends on categories we usually take for granted. It's not an easy read, but it's a rewarding one—especially now, when questions of gender identity have moved to the center of cultural conversation. Brophy was grappling with these ideas half a century ago, using the tools of experimental fiction to take them seriously.

The title itself is revealing. "In transit" means between places, neither here nor there, suspended. The protagonist's situation literalizes what many people experience psychologically: the sense that identity is something we're always in the process of discovering rather than something fixed at birth.

Brophy's later novels continued her explorations. The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl from 1973 inverts the title of George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God—a typical Brophy move, taking something from a writer she admired and turning it inside out. Her final novel, Palace Without Chairs in 1978, is set in a fictional European kingdom where a democratic royal family faces political intrigue. Prince Ulrich, heir to the throne, rebels against expectations in ways that clearly won Brophy's sympathy.

Beyond Fiction: The Polemicist and Critic

Brophy never limited herself to novels. She was a ceaseless worker who often handled several different types of project at once, switching between creative fiction and meticulously researched non-fiction.

Her first major study, Black Ship to Hell in 1962, takes its title from Greek myths of the underworld. It's a wide-ranging examination of humanity's self-destructive tendencies, approached through a Freudian analytical framework. Mozart the Dramatist, first published in 1964 and revised in 1990, argues that Mozart possessed an extraordinary gift for presenting authentic human psychology in his operas.

Prancing Novelist, published in 1973, is a critical biography of Ronald Firbank that doubles as a defense of the value of fiction itself. Brophy wrote two books on the artist Aubrey Beardsley, whose mastery of black ink on white paper she not only admired but profoundly understood.

In 1967, Brophy collaborated with her husband Michael Levey and their friend Charles Osborne on Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, a deliberately provocative attack on the literary canon. The book debunked texts traditionally served up to students as "great literature" and caused considerable clamour. Some critics were outraged by the trio's cheek. Brophy, characteristically, didn't mind the controversy at all.

She was constantly in demand as a book reviewer, contributing to journals and newspapers with pieces that were often acerbic and always sharp. She wrote essays, pamphlets for causes she supported, and endless letters to editors. She never missed an opportunity to comment on vivisection, the Vietnam War, or censorship—all of which she vehemently opposed. If she spotted a factual error or a piece of sophistry in print, she would write to point it out.

The Fight for Authors' Rights

In the early 1970s, Brophy joined forces with her husband, Maureen Duffy, and two others to form the Writers Action Group. They chose the acronym WAG deliberately, pronouncing it to rhyme with "bag" and acknowledging their sense of humor about their own enterprise.

Their cause was simple to state and maddeningly difficult to achieve: authors should receive a small payment each time one of their books was borrowed from a British public library.

Think about it from a writer's perspective. You spend years creating a book. A library buys one copy. That single copy gets read by hundreds of people over the years. The library paid once; the author received their share of that one sale. Meanwhile, hundreds of readers benefit from the work without the author seeing another penny.

The concept of a Public Lending Right had been championed by Brophy's own father, John Brophy, back in the early 1950s. He called his version "The Brophy Penny"—a different funding mechanism than what his daughter would eventually achieve, but the same underlying idea that authors deserved compensation for library borrowing.

Brigid Brophy picked up her father's cause and pursued it with characteristic tenacity. For seven years, the campaign consumed almost all her time. The Writers Action Group recruited support from fellow authors, organized publicity stunts including a demonstration with placards in central London, and lobbied sympathetic members of Parliament.

In 1979, the Public Lending Right bill finally passed. Today, British authors still receive payments based on how often their books are borrowed from public libraries. It's not a fortune, but it's recognition—and it exists because Brigid Brophy refused to give up.

The Rights of Animals

Brophy became a vegetarian at twenty-five. Her husband and daughter followed. She refused to wear leather.

These weren't quiet personal choices. Brophy made them loudly and publicly, arguing for animal rights long before the movement became mainstream.

In 1965, The Sunday Times invited her to write an opinion piece. Her response, "The Rights of Animals," became one of the most influential articles in the development of the animal rights movement. The title deliberately echoed Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man," making a provocative parallel: if we accept that humans have inherent rights simply by virtue of being sentient creatures, why should other sentient creatures be excluded?

Brophy gave speeches at anti-vivisection societies and contributed to the 1971 book Animals, Men and Morals, a collection that helped shape the philosophical foundations of animal rights activism. Her arguments weren't sentimental; they were logical, building from first principles about suffering and moral consideration.

She started from a position that was radical for its time but feels increasingly mainstream today: if an animal can suffer, we have some obligation to consider that suffering. The capacity for pain doesn't depend on species membership. A laboratory animal feels pain just as genuinely as a human patient.

This wasn't abstract philosophy for Brophy. It connected directly to her childhood listening to lions roar in London Zoo, to her novel about an ape sent into space against his will, to her daily choices about what to eat and wear.

An Irrepressible Imagination

Beyond her novels and non-fiction, Brophy wrote in nearly every form available. She produced plays, including a radio drama called The Waste Disposal Unit broadcast in 1964 and a theatrical farce called The Burglar that opened in Brighton before transferring to London's West End in 1967. The stage play flopped badly—she would later call it "a singular and stinging flop"—but even failure didn't slow her down.

She wrote a children's book called Pussy Owl in 1976, featuring an invented creature she called a "Superbeast"—the narcissistic, stomping offspring of Edward Lear's Owl and Pussycat. The BBC devoted an episode of their children's program Jackanory to it.

In 1969, Brophy collaborated with Maureen Duffy on something entirely unexpected: an art exhibition. They displayed homemade three-dimensional "heads and boxes" at a London gallery, calling their work "Prop Art." Each piece illustrated or evoked abstract concepts using visual and verbal puns. The exhibition generated puzzled publicity, and few pieces sold. But that wasn't really the point. The point was that Brophy's imagination refused to stay within conventional boundaries.

She devised a literary panel game for television called "Take It Or Leave It," where well-known authors competed. She maintained voluminous correspondence with other writers and thinkers. She seemed incapable of doing only one thing at a time.

The Difficult Legacy

Brophy was not easy to categorize during her lifetime, and she remains difficult to place now. Her experimental fiction put her in conversation with postmodern writers, but she never joined any movement or school. Her activism connected her to animal rights and gay rights, but she was too cantankerous to be anyone's standard-bearer. Her literary criticism was too sharp and personal to fit academic conventions.

She made enemies by being right too often and saying so too loudly. She could be arrogant, dismissive, and exhausting. She could also be deeply loyal, intellectually generous, and devastatingly funny.

The multiple sclerosis that eventually killed her robbed her of her mobility and independence but never silenced her voice entirely. Even from a nursing home in Lincolnshire, far from the London literary world where she had made her name, she remained Brigid Brophy: difficult, brilliant, uncompromising.

Her manuscripts now reside at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington—a final resting place that would probably have amused her, the papers of this very English writer ending up in the American Midwest.

The Public Lending Right she fought for still operates, still sends small checks to authors, still acknowledges that writers deserve something when their work is read. The animal rights movement she helped shape has grown into a global force. Her novels, especially The Snow Ball and In Transit, continue to find new readers—Faber and Faber reissued The Snow Ball as recently as 2020.

She would have hated being forgotten. She would have been worse at being remembered incorrectly. The best tribute to Brigid Brophy is probably to read her—to pick up In Transit and grapple with its puns and paradoxes, to encounter a mind that refused to accept easy answers about who we are and what we owe each other.