Brigid Brophy

Brigid Antonia Brophy (born June 12, 1929 in London , † August 7, 1995 in Louth, Lincolnshire ) was a London author.

Biographical

Brophy was born in London, the only daughter of the Anglo-Irish writer John Brophy and the nurse, teacher and social worker Charis Grundy. She attended St. Paul's Girls' School in London and was admitted to St. Hugh's Catholic College, Oxford as a scholarship holder in 1947. Despite performing well, she was expelled in her sophomore year for "unspecified violations". It is believed that it was drunkenness while praying or a lesbian relationship.

She then worked as a secretary for a porn director in London and began writing on the side. In 1953 she published the short stories The Crown Princess and other Stories and the novel Hackenfeller's Ape . The latter tells the story of a monkey at London Zoo and its approach to the primatologist who was studying its mating behavior, and it won the Cheltenham Literature Festival's award for best debut novel.

Brophy married Michael Levey , an art historian and author of The Case of Walter Pater (director of the National Gallery from 1973 ) , in 1954 . In the context of the literary scene in the 1960s, this marriage, along with Brophy's open bisexuality and her open criticism of marriage, heteronormativity and monogamy, was a cause celèbre . Her gender- political views, which she expounded in Don't Never Forget (1963) or Baroque 'n' Roll and Other Essays (1986), are also recurring elements in her writings. In 1979 (or 1984?) Brophy's constant physical ailments were diagnosed as multiple sclerosis . She then slowly withdrew from the public eye and passed away on August 7, 1995. She left behind her husband and daughter, Kate. After the death of Iris Murdoch in 1999, an affair between the two women became public.

Non-fiction author and political activity

In addition to her stories, Brophy earned a reputation as a literary critic and author of various non-fiction books, with which she often provoked. For example, she was co-author of the volume Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without ("Fifty works of English literature that we could do without"), where she panned Jane Eyre among others . She wrote an extensive treatise on psychoanalysis ( Black Ship to Hell , 1962) as well as various opera guides and a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . In addition to Mozart and Sigmund Freud , George Bernard Shaw was a major influence in her literary work, and her editor described the fact that Michael Holroyd was appointed by the Society of Authors as its biographer as perhaps the greatest setback in her career.

In addition to her work as a writer, Brophy was a diverse activist. For example, she was intensely committed to remuneration for authors from the state based on the number of loans in public libraries. She designed for a remuneration model that is essentially a public lending is ( Public Lending Right ) and generated in the 1970s with the Writer's Action Group , who in this matter with Maureen Duffy led strong support for legislative reforms accordingly. From 1979 the public lending right was legally implemented. Brophy's other political commitment was animal rights advocacy and veganism . She attracted national interest with an essay The Rights of Animals in 1965 and is credited with having a significant influence in the formation of the early animal rights movement in England. She also expressed herself as a pacifist and particularly critical of the Vietnam War . In 1975 she was co-author of a call to boycott the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Fonts

• The Crown Princess and Other Stories , Viking (New York, NY), 1953.
• Hackenfeller's Ape , Hart-Davis (London), 1953, Random House (New York, NY), 1954, Virago Press (London), 1991.
• The King of a Rainy Country , Secker & Warburg (London), 1956, Knopf (New York, NY), 1957, reprinted with afterword, Virago Press , 1990.
• Flesh , Secker & Warburg, 1962, World (Cleveland, OH), 1963.
• The Finishing Touch (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1963, revised edition, GMP (London), 1987.
• The Snow Ball (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1964.
• The Finishing Touch [and] The Snow Ball , World, 1964.
• The Burglar (play; first produced in London at Vaudeville Theater, February 22, 1967), Holt (New York, NY), 1968.
• In Transit: An Heroicycle Novel , Macdonald & Co. (London), 1969, Putnam (New York, NY), 1970, Dalkey Archive Press, (Chicago, IL), 2002.
• The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl: A Novel and Some Fables , Macmillan (London), 1973, Little, Brown and Company (Boston), 1974.
• Pussy Owl: Superbeast (for children), illustrated by Hilary Hayton, BBC Publications (London), 1976.
• Palace without Chairs: A Baroque Novel , Atheneum (New York, NY), 1978.
• Black Ship to Hell , Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.
• Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age , Harcourt, 1964, revised edition, Da Capo (New York, NY), 1990.
• Don't Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews , Cape (London), 1966, Holt, 1967.
• (With husband, Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne) Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without , Rapp & Carroll (London), 1967, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1968.
• Religious Education in State Schools , Fabian Society (London), 1967.
• Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley , Cape , 1968, Stein & Day, 1969.
• The Rights of Animals , Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society , (London), 1969.
• The Longford Threat to Freedom , National Secular Society (London), 1972.
• Prancing Novelist: A Defense of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank , Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1973.
• Beardsley and His World , Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1976.
• The Prince and the Wild Geese , pictures by Gregoire Gagarin , Hamish Hamilton (London), 1982, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1983.
• A Guide to Public Lending Right , Gower (Hampshire, England), 1983.
• Baroque 'n' Roll and Other Essays , David & Charles (North Pomfret, VT), 1987.
• Reads: A Collection of Essays , Cardinal (London), 1989.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Patricia Juliana Smith: Brophy, Brigid (1929-1995) ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture (December 2002)  
2. ^ Sarah Lyall: Brigid Brophy Is Dead at 66; Novelist, Critic and Crusader in The New York Times , August 9, 1995
3. ^ ^{A b} Giles Gordon (her editor): Obituary: Brigid Brophy in The Independent , August 8, 1995
4. ↑ PDF at library.duke.edu ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ^ Black Ship to Hell (work by Brophy) . In: Encyclopedia Britannica . Retrieved May 20, 2012. 
6. ↑ B. Brophy: The Darwinist's Dilemma. Archived from the original on December 23, 2011. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Critical Society . 1, No. 1, 2009, pp. 15-22. 
7. ^ Brigid Brophy: The Rights of Animals . In: Reads . Abacus, September 6, 1990, ISBN 0-7474-0275-2 . Title based on Tom Paines The Rights of Man . Herman Daggett also gave a controversial lecture of the same title at Providence College in 1791 , which Brophy may have been familiar with.
8. ^ R. D Ryder: Animal revolution: Changing attitudes toward speciesism . Berg Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1-85973-330-1 , p. 5.
9. ↑ Lionel Abrahams, Brigid Brophy et al .: Boycott: A matter of personal taste or public principle? . In: Index on Censorship . 4, No. 2, 1975, ISSN  0306-4220 , pp. 10-38. doi : 10.1080 / 03064227508532420 .