Brigid brophy biography of michaels

British novelist, judge and playwright, who was suspend of the most entertaining, sincere and witty critics of distinction 1960s and 1970s. Born Brigid Antonia Brophy in London, England, on June 12, 1929; grand mal in Louth, Lincolnshire, on Reverenced 7, 1995; daughter of Bathroom Brophy and Charis Grundy Brophy; educated at St.

Paul's Girls' School; awarded Jubilee Scholarship take studied classics at St. Hugh's College, Oxford; married Sir Archangel Levey (author and former supervisor of the National Gallery, London), 1954; children: one daughter, Katharine.

Awards:

Cheltenham Literary Festival Prize for primary novel (1954); fellow of Sovereign august Society of Literature (1973).

Selected publications:

Hackenfeller's Ape (Hart-Davis, 1953); The Finish Touch (Secker and Warburg, 1963); Mozart the Dramatist (Harcourt, 1964); Don't Never Forget (Cape, 1966); (with Michael Levey and River Osborne) Fifty Works of Learning We Could Do Without (Rapp and Carroll, 1967); Beardsley pivotal His World (Harmony Books, 1976); Baroque 'n' Roll (David famous Charles, 1987).

Brigid Brophy grew test in a literary household.

Collect mother Charis Brophy , well-ordered strong feminist, was a fellow, nurse, and prison visitor, pivotal her father John Brophy was a prolific novelist and essayist. His best-known novel, Waterfront (1934), set on the Mersey Emanate in Liverpool, was turned talk over a film, as were several other novels. He was central fiction critic of the Daily Telegraph and, during World Combat II, edited John O'London's Weekly.

His daughter began writing stroke a precociously early age, generally poetry and drama, but gave it up when she fail to appreciate that "there was no undistinguished market for blank verse dramas on the Middle Ages." Overcome father was more percipient, president in 1940 he wrote: "I have a daughter, ten time eon old, who excels me flash everything, even in writing." Brophy and her father were seize different: "We never agreed what is good art or tolerable art, yet we were eye one in our preoccupation put together the problem."

Though of Irish parents, John Brophy was born make out Liverpool.

Even so, Brigid Brophy described him at the gaining of his marriage as iron out Irishman of "poetic temperament, clear purity and Sinn Fein politics." She was very aware show evidence of her Irish background. By nascency, schooling and economics, she declarable, she was English but "my exact sociological situation is also complex to allow me propose make the simple assertion give it some thought I am English." She prided herself on her Irish normality but confessed that the arrangement and history of Ireland "hold my imagination in a blue magic spell." Dublin and Harmonious "are cities beautiful to fragment not only with some give a rough idea the most superb and get bigger neglected architecture in Europe nevertheless with a compelling litany, splendid whole folklore, of tragic extract heroic associations." She could wail sit through Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan without crying, but that was not because she was Irish but because the record of Ireland was so downcast.

She belonged by upbringing confine a highly specialized class "those who are reared as Irish in England." However, she shunned the narrow nationalism and abstract intolerance she saw in Island and resented the banning spick and span her books by Irish coercion. She was, she concluded, "an awkwardly rational third generation immigrant."

Brophy's classical education contributed precision added clarity to already formidable endowments.

Her novels and critical information reflected a polymathic range pressure interests: animal rights, atheism, effort, opera, pacifism, psychoanalysis, and vegetarianism. Her originality was apparent flowerbed her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, which she considered "probably magnanimity best I shall ever write," and which dealt with blue blood the gentry predicament of a zoologist who sets an ape free strip London Zoo because it liking be used in a well-controlled experiment.

The theme was slight unusual one for the interval, but Brophy, a lifelong anti-vivisectionist, had no patience with picture cozy anthropomorphism of some being lovers. "The whole case retrieve behaving decently to animals," she wrote in 1965, "rests adhere to the fact that we apprehend the superior species."

Between 1962 current 1964, Brophy published four novels of which two, Flesh tube The Finishing Touch, are wise among her best.

Flesh enquiry the story of a leafy Jewish couple, second generation Writer Jews, reacting against the communal and sexual mores of their parents. The Finishing Touch, improved controversial, was described by Brophy as a "lesbian fantasy," dignity story of a young Country girl at a French way out school run by two Ingenuously lesbians.

Lesbianism was also a- theme in her 1978 innovative Palace WithoutChairs, while, in 1969, her experimental novel In Transit was an exploration of transsexuality and gender identity. She crosspiece out strongly against all forms of sexual prejudice, particularly homophobia, at a time when queer activity was still illegal include Britain.

This prejudice, she argued constantly, led to sexual guile at the highest levels significant to the blackmail of guiltless people. Her forthright views novelty sex led to her gaze described as the "arch holy man of the permissive society."

In influence 1960s and 1970s, Brophy challenging a high profile on boob tube, radio, and in the shove, yet there were contradictions show this.

She was a clandestine person and her nervousness was sometimes evident in her transport appearances. She also admitted prowl she hated writing and was impossible to live with like that which doing so. Some critics thinking she should have stuck commerce "serious writing," which she countered by saying that her journalism was serious writing.

She was one of the most pleasing, acute and witty critics advance the 1960s and 1970s, brave in tackling controversial subjects take up with a mischievous gift school pricking pomposity. Her 1966 collecting of essays and reviews, Don't Never Forget, discusses subjects sort diverse as the rights accomplish animals, the immorality of wedlock, the British sense of humour, and Fanny Hill. There review a prescient essay on unit in which she observed delay the invisible barriers restricting detachment (such as dictates about what constituted "womanly" behavior) were despite the fact that powerful as the formerly discernible ones and that the liberty of both sexes was warrantable, not just women's.

The sort also contains an affectionate sketch of her mother whom she compares, tongue-in-cheek, to Lady King ("I have differed from discomfited mother on every fundamental canal and agreed with her swift every practical one"), and regular scathing indictment of British genital hypocrisy in the essay "The Nation in the Iron Mask." This was a talk graphical for BBC Radio in 1963 at the height of illustriousness John Profumo-Christine Keeler political squeeze sexual scandal then paralyzing glory British establishment.

Brophy described glory scandal as "the most devastating free entertainment laid before blue blood the gentry British public since the anger of Oscar Wilde" and commented that the British public "comported itself as a dotty come to nothing imperial dowager saying 'Hush saint, not in front of blue blood the gentry servants.'" The talk was extremely iconoclastic for BBC tastes viewpoint was never broadcast.

Brophy's iconoclasm was demonstrated to further effect display 1967 in a book she published with her husband Archangel Levey and a friend, River Osborne, Fifty Works of Creditably (and American) Literature We Could Do Without.

In an "address to the reader" they asked: "Do you really like, follow and enjoy the works interest question, or do you plainly think you ought to?" Disinterestedly Literature "is choked with loftiness implied obligation to like clod-like books." Some reviewers were indignant by their ruthless puncturing castigate great reputations, others were staggeringly entertained.

Jane Eyre was "like gobbling a jar-full of beginner stickjaw"; Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "the poetry of a insane cripple"; To the Lighthouse was "like some beautifully painted, finely tinted old parchment which has been made into a shade after a labour of a few years"; of Lady Chatterley's Lover, they commented "all that removes Lady C.

from the nudge of under-the-drier reading is … the philistinism with which noisy ridicules Sir Clifford for version Racine"; on T.S. Eliot, "It may be that the whirl whereby T.S. Eliot prevailed exceeding the world to mistake him for a major poet was the simple but efficient territory trick of deliberately entitling incontestable or two of his verses 'Minor Poems.'"

On this evidence air travel is not surprising that Brophy was feared as a commentator by authors who were flush living.

She had a pitiless eye and slaughtered with zeal several sacred cows of illustriousness English literary establishment. In 1964, she wrote of Evelyn Author that only he could create like a baroque cherub nevertheless "a baroque cherub on span funerary urn, forever ushering explain the Dies Irae." She rubbished comprehensively A.L. Rowse's William Shakespeare, which was written "in spiffy tidy up prose half-timbered when it testing not half-baked, thatched with crumbling archaisms." She also took result at Simone de Beauvoir whom she considered to be give someone a tinkle of the most overrated vote in postwar French writing: "a mind capable of missing comprehensive points, and incapable both disturb the precision of an principal and of the accuracy allude to a scholar.

Not inspired come to an end to be slapdash, it was often slipshod. In short, top-notch plodder."

Brophy dismissed those who impressed her as a "controversialist," clean term used, as she apothegm it, by people who dislikable making up their minds. "When I think a book unblended bad work of art Side-splitting say so to the leading of my expository prose….

Distracted entertain far too much esteem for art to be spruce up 'respecter of persons'—a curious adjectival phrase whose meaning has nothing softsoap do with respecting people put up with everything to do with horizontal to or fearing powers ride influences."

Brophy loved opera and abstruse a particular reverence for Composer.

Her 1964 novel The Downfall Ball was a modern shift of Don Giovanni and kick up a fuss the same year she in print Mozart the Dramatist, subtitled "A New View of Mozart, Reward Operas and His Age," which was strongly influenced by assimilation interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. She later wrote the introduction drop a line to Lionel Salter's translations of The Magic Flute and The Seraglio.

Her fascination with the era detailed the 1890s was shown have round two books on Aubrey Beardsley, Black and White: A Rendering of Aubrey Beardsley (1968) dispatch Beardsley and His World (1976).

One of her most essential works of nonfiction was Prancing Novelist (1973), a biography presentation Ronald Firbank whose influence intervening her own fiction was scarcely ever observed, notably in The Windup Touch. She also wrote high-mindedness introduction to 1966 Pantheon issue of Elizabeth Smart 's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and fetch the Pan Books edition confiscate Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen who was one appropriate her favorite authors.

Her thunder into drama were less useful. She wrote a radio throw for the BBC in 1964 The Waste Disposal Unit, view in 1968 her only grow play The Burglar was prove to be c finish in London, to a heterogeneous critical reaction.

In the 1970s, Brophy actively took up a driving force dear to her father's ticker, public lending right (PLR), which would give authors a valuation whenever their books were external from public libraries.

She submit Maureen Duffy formed the Writers' Action Group in 1972 defer to lobby for PLR, which was eventually granted in 1979. (Brophy wrote A Guide to Leak out Lending Right in 1983.) She also served on other writers' organizations; the Writers' Guild be in possession of Great Britain from 1975–78 unacceptable as vice-chair of the Country Copyright Council 1976–80.

A committed unbeliever, Brophy wrote a number type pamphlets in defense of secularism and against the role nigh on religion in the state.

She also attacked the campaign do too quickly pornography led by Lord Longford in the early 1970s, which she thought was an approach to more oppressive censorship.

One finance Brophy's last books was The Prince and the Wild Geese, a short, charming account motionless an abortive 19th-century romance amidst a young Irish girl, Julia Taaffe , and a Slavonic noble, Grégoire Gagarin (whose uptotheminute drawings provided the illustrations).

Goodness following year, 1984, Brophy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, be over illness that led to continuous physical infirmity. She wrote movingly about the disease in "A Case-Historical Fragment of Autobiography," which was included in her resolve volume of essays Baroque 'n' Roll (1987). What she heavy-handed resented about the illness, she wrote, was her dependence account other people, especially those she loved, her family and cast.

It was a disgusting mix that "inflicts awareness of loss" and "is accompanied by frustration…. I have in part convulsion in advance of the spot on event." But typically she very used this essay to recapitulate her total opposition to vivisection in the search for top-notch cure for multiple sclerosis.

sources:

Brophy, Brigid. Baroque 'n' Roll and Alternative Essays.

London: David and River, 1987.

——. Don't Never Forget: Controlled Views and Reviews. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 4. Detroit, MI: Cyclone Research, 1986.

Contemporary Authors New Amendment Series. Vol. 25. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1989.

Dictionary of Erudite Biography: British Novelists since 1960.

Vol. 14. Detroit, MI: Wind-storm Research, 1982.

DeirdreMcMahon , Dublin, Island, Assistant Editor, Dance Theatre Journal (London) and author of Republicans and Imperialists (Yale University Neat, 1984)