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Brigid Brophy: novelist, critic, biographer, journalist and promoter of - amongst much else - animal rights, Mozart, Firbank and the Baroque. Her writing is inimitable and incomparable. READS captures her spirit in a collection of reviews and essays spanning the whole period of her writing career.
"We read therefore we are. The idea is suggested to me by Brigid Brophy's essays, which constitute on the of the strongest proofs of personal identity I have ever come across. If a real person is not here, where is a person to be found. She writes therefore she is, and to receive such an impression, so clearly, is very uncommon indeed."
John Bayley, London Review of Books
"Where hesitation would be expected, in quite brisk persons, she has always had the gift of a most stirring sort of firmness. It is not the tone of a knowall, it is not remotely bossy; it is, I suppose, basically, the sound that logic makes. She is stunningly logical. But she can turn the pursuit of logical connection into a dance for which the music might well have been written by Mozart, whom she adores, and who also had the gift of being adamant."
Edward Blishen, Time Educational Supplement
"We read therefore we are. The idea is suggested to me by Brigid Brophy's essays, which constitute on the of the strongest proofs of personal identity I have ever come across. If a real person is not here, where is a person to be found. She writes therefore she is, and to receive such an impression, so clearly, is very uncommon indeed."
John Bayley, London Review of Books
"Where hesitation would be expected, in quite brisk persons, she has always had the gift of a most stirring sort of firmness. It is not the tone of a knowall, it is not remotely bossy; it is, I suppose, basically, the sound that logic makes. She is stunningly logical. But she can turn the pursuit of logical connection into a dance for which the music might well have been written by Mozart, whom she adores, and who also had the gift of being adamant."
Edward Blishen, Time Educational Supplement
- GenresEssays
185 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
Brigid Brophy
42 books50 followersBrigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. 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 was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
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July 12, 2013
Brilliant sophist, completely indifferent to the strictures of the paradigm in which she is operating, supremely unaware, despite professed feminism and anti-oppression stance, of how she upholds patriarchal, exploitative, perspectives. Her essays, and herself, are riddled with logic and explicit value premises and thus deserve studying for her ability to construct argument, however she demonstrates, like Marx, a singular trompe l'oeil with respect to her own inherited mode of observation, analysis and interpretation, and temporal situation. The only essay, naturally, with which I can uninhibitedly (and, naturally unthinkingly) agree is her essay on animals. She is a modern-day polemicist of the acute variety; Theroux would have lapped at her teats without a second's thought.
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