Brigid Brophy

Brigid Brophy’s most recent books are The Prince and the Wild Geese, the text for a series of drawings inspired by Prince Gagarin’s love for Julia Taaffe in 1832, and A Guide to Public Lending Right.

Letter

Woman in Love

7 February 1985

Brigid Brophy writes: How odd of Professor Halperin to suppose that the difference between the title he repeatedly attributes to Mary Wollstonecraft’s book and its true title is merely the difference between North American and British English.
Letter

Shaviana

2 December 1982

Brigid Brophy writes: Mr Silver misses the distinction between what was known and, perhaps, privately discussable and what Shaw would have wanted to represent (or, with uncharacteristic slyness, to hint) in the theatre or on the page printed under his name, just as he misses the distinction between a regular and secure ‘private income’ and the chancy earnings of a freelance writer.
Letter

Arts Councillors

7 October 1982

SIR: I’m glad to learn that, though he seems to dislike professionalism in the arts, Mr Hutchison (Letters, 4 November) really has it in only for ‘professional narcissism’. (I imagine he means this phrase to imply that professional artists are narcissists, not that narcissists can make a living from their narcissism.) May I take the chance to add a more interesting footnote to my review, which...
Letter

Unfair to Reich

15 April 1982

SIR: I wonder what was in your mind when you decided to publish (Letters, 21 July) a letter that asserted that my review of the Reich-Neill Correspondence ‘was pure spite’ and that went on to speculate ‘that Brophy was working off some kind of grudge – that she had been undergoing a more orthodox analysis and vaguely suspected that Reichian therapy would have had far better results.’I have...
Letter

Sexist Language

4 February 1982

Brigid Brophy writes: ‘Logical error’, my foot – an expression that should, by this doctrine, be censored, because that may well be (though it may equally well not be) a ‘necessary step’ towards justice for the disabled (another ‘cause we all must support’).

Pieces about Brigid Brophy in the LRB

Unblenched: Homage to Brigid Brophy

Lucie Elven, 21 March 2024

Brophy’s writing is propelled by the excitement of the intellect, while the emotion is held within the structure. She found a form for her work that accommodated her need for artifice, for self-creation...

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Recognising Mozart

Peter Gay, 7 July 1988

The literature on Mozart is almost as diverse, though surely not quite so glorious, as Mozart’s own output. These three books are a case in point: a freewheeling analysis of Mozart the...

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Skinned alive

John Bayley, 25 June 1987

Amusing, and perhaps instructive, to think of great paintings whose voyage into mystery and meaning seems to depend, in the first instance, on a technical trick: a separation of planes so that...

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In praise of Brigid Brophy

John Bayley, 5 March 1987

In his recent book Reasons and Persons the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is inclined to decide that persons have no existence, and that the motives to morality are for that reason clearer and...

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Julia Caesar

Marilyn Butler, 17 March 1983

The Prince and the Wild Geese is a story of 1832 told in words and pictures, the words almost all Brigid Brophy’s, the pictures by Prince Grégoire Gagarin, artist son of the Russian...

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A Writer’s Fancy

D.J. Enright, 21 February 1980

Brigid Brophy’s novels have often been described as ‘brilliantly written’: a judgment which can have done her sales little good. (‘Don’t bother with that book...

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