The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl

by Brigid Brophy

'In the title story of [The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl] the main character, God himself, expresses a taste for writing that's sophisticated, stylish, literary. The words apply very well to [Brigid] Brophy's own best work.' New Republic

'What we have here is more common in England than America: reading that's at once very light and very intellectual. Consistent with her commitment to artifice and the rococo, Brophy believes in play... [She] is liveliest when speaking-or making the illustrious dead speak-of the life of art, of literature, music, architecture, which she thinks about a lot and knows a lot about.' Washington Post

'Tasty and nutritious... generally wise and witty... full of game-playing... Brigid Brophy remains a good though very British writer-balanced, erudite, sensible, unsubmissive to shrill sociological shibboleths, above all unscared.' Anthony Burgess, New York Times Book Review

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1974

About the author

Brigid 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.

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title-piece takes up approximately the last half of this volume, and is far the most interesting thing in it. But in the "fables" which precede it, some only a line or two long, there is much wit and lots of fun for the literary enthusiast. Brophy positively revels in allusiveness (the title is a reference to Shaw), and some of the most enjoyable pieces are take-offs of forms like the Christie detective-novel or the Galsworthy 'saga.' The main piece is, literally, a ramble through a metaphysical wonderland, whose only fictional character is God! Brophy has a wonderfully polemical time with politics, religion and even literary criticism, and, however much one may disagree with her views on a subject, one cannot help admiring the vigour and inventiveness with which she puts forth those views. She is a master of the clever insinuation and of the art of slipping the crucial point by you as a premise in the argument! I find her irreverence refreshing rather than offensive, and her commitment to particular points of view - atheism, humanism, vegetariansim - worthy of respect. [These notes made in 1984:]

[Pieter Kranenborg]

Maf boek. De korte verhalen vond ik flauw, maar de novelle die de helft van het boek in beslag neemt was bij vlagen verslavend. Over God die tussen een allegaartje aan personages in de hemel (Voltaire, een psychoanalyticus, een 'nederige christen') erachter wil komen hoe hij de mensen van zijn niet-bestaan kan overtuigen. Hij vindt het zo lullig beschuldigd te worden van natuurrampen en ander leed, terwijl hij er ook niets aan kan doen dat hij bedacht is.