Brigid Brophy, English author and critic (b. 1929)
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929 – 7 August 1995) was a British writer and campaigner for social reforms, including the rights of authors, and animal rights. The first of her seven novels was Hackenfeller's Ape (1953), a story concerning the ethics of sending a captive ape, Percy, into space. Brophy's The Snow Ball (1964), is considered her masterpiece: set at a costume ball on new year's eve, it is a glittering piece which weaves together sex, death and Mozart. In Transit (1969), is her most radical fiction in form and handling, and was in the vanguard of gender-fluid literary conceptualisations. The novel is considered to be a pioneering work of post-modernism and an iconic feminist surrealist fantasia. (For a list of her books, see Writings, below.)
Brophy's articles, together with frequent appearances on television in the 1960s–1970s, created the image of her as the enfant terrible of British literature. She was eloquent and forthright in her views: she agitated for homosexual equality, for vegetarianism, prison reform and humanism, in an era when such ideas were regarded as cranky or dangerous. She argued the case against the Vietnam war, against sexual repression, marriage, and vivisection, and asserted that compulsory religious education in state schools was unjustifiable.
Brigid Brophy was also a literary critic of exceptional repute, and a writer of substantial works of non-fiction. Among her critical studies were Mozart the Dramatist (1964, revised 1990) and Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank, which appeared in 1973.
In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."
She married art historian Michael Levey in 1954. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983.