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
Brigid Brophy writes: If politics is its ‘central theme’, Mr MacCabe’s book is even emptier than I thought. A last chapter of 13 pages recounts, largely through his letters to his brother, Joyce’s understandably out-of-touch efforts to follow Irish and European politics from the position of an expatriate in Trieste. In addition, Mr MacCabe purports to give a ‘political reading’ of Finnegans...
Letter
Brigid Brophy writes: The Mitford butterfly was exploded in 1869. Mary Russell Mitford was recounting her mother’s supposedly eye-witness account, which her mother dated to the period before her own marriage. J.E. Austen-Leigh was able to show that the mother moved out of the Austens’ neighbourhood when Jane Austen was seven. Being nice to writers they exploit is an old tradition of British publishers....
Letter
Brigid Brophy writes: The Mitford butterfly was exploded in 1869. Mary Russell Mitford was recounting her mother’s supposedly eye-witness account, which her mother dated to the period before her own marriage. J.E. Austen-Leigh was able to show that the mother moved out of the Austens’ neighbourhood when Jane Austen was seven. Being nice to writers they exploit is an old tradition of British publishers....
Letter

Women Painters

22 November 1979

Brigid Brophy writes: Ms Aukin may dislike domestic service and opera singing as professions women could practise, but her dislike doesn’t magically lend truth to Ms Greer’s assertion that until 1879 they didn’t exist. Aphra Behn earned her living on her own in the 1660s and became well enough thought of to be buried in the Abbey. So Ms Greer’s claim that ‘until a hundred years ago’ a woman...

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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