Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist

273 Pages·2020·5.696 MB·English

by  Richard Canning (editor), Gerri Kimber (editor)

Brigid Brophy
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Brigid Brophy
Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist
Edited by Richard Canning and
Gerri Kimber
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber, 2020
© the chapters their several authors, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by
IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 6266 2 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 6268 6 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 6269 3 (epub)
The right of Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber to be identifi ed as the editors of this
work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Richard Canning
1 Embodying the Fragments: A Refl ection on the
Reluctant Auto-Biography of Brigid Brophy 10
Phoebe Blatton
2 Brigid Brophy’s Paradoxical World of Childhood 20
Michael Bronski
3 Intro duction to ‘The Librarian and the Novel’ 31
John Dixon
4 The Librarian and the Novel: A Writer’s View 37
Brigid Brophy
5 Penetrating (the) Prancing Novelist 49
Richard Canning
6 ‘Shavian that she was’ 75
John Dixon
7 ‘Il faut que je vive’: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights 94
Gary L. Francione
8 Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in Flesh and
The Snow Ball 119
Jonathan Gibbs
9 Letter to Brigid 137
Rodney Hill
10 Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction
of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch 143
Miles Leeson
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vi Contents
11 ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration
by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy 162
Jill Longmate
12 Prancing Novelist and Black and White: Experiments
in Biography 182
Peter Parker
13 ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball 193
Allan Pero
14 ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’ 210
Kim Stallwood
15 The Dissenting Feminist 220
Carole Sweeney
16 A Certain Detachment? 235
Kate Levey
Notes on Contributors 242
Index 245
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Illustrations
1 Brigid Brophy books. Collection of Rodney Hill 139
2 Inscribed copy of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball.
Collection of Rodney Hill 141
3 The front cover of Iris Murdoch’s copy of Flesh, collaged
by Brigid Brophy. Iris Murdoch Special Collection,
Kingston University 152
4 The back cover of Iris Murdoch’s copy of Flesh, collaged
by Brigid Brophy. Iris Murdoch Special Collection,
Kingston University 153
5 The front fl ap of the dust jacket of Iris Murdoch’s
copy of Flesh, collaged by Brigid Brophy. Iris Murdoch
Special Collection, Kingston University 154
6 [WOMAN]IFESTO of PROP ART. Credit: Brigid Brophy 165
7 Tête de l’homme garnie. Photo: Euan Duff 169
8 Aunt Eater. Photo: Euan Duff 169
9 Headquarters. Photo: Euan Duff 170
10 Maedusa: with a view to. Photo: Euan Duff 172
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Acknowledgements
This volume owes so much to the enormous generosity of Kate
Levey, Brigid Brophy’s daughter and literary executor, who facili-
tated all permissions for copyright material regarding her mother’s
estate, and who engaged personally with many contributors to this
volume, as well as providing images and photographs from the Prop
Art exhibition. On behalf of all the contributors, we offer Kate our
most sincere and heartfelt thanks.
It has been a pleasure working with editorial staff as talented,
responsive and enabling as those working for Edinburgh University
Press: special thanks are due to Dr Jackie Jones, its Publisher of Lit-
erary Studies, Dr Ersev Ersoy, James Dale, Carla Hepburn, Rebecca
Mackenzie, and, last but not least, our diligent copy-editor, Andrew
Kirk. Ralph Kimber has compiled an outstanding index for this vol-
ume, and both Editors and all contributors are in his debt.
Sincerest thanks also go to Maureen Duffy for her generosity and
oversight in enabling both the reproduction of images from the Prop
Art exhibition and the excerpted text from its manifesto. Thanks are
also due to Euan Duff, for generously allowing the reproduction of
his Prop Art photographs, and to John Dixon and Rodney Hill, not
only for fi nding and sending on ‘The Librarian and the Novel’ from
the publication Fiction Papers One, but for coping stoically with
the news of the latter succumbing to a fi re in a co-editor’s fl at, and
for subsequently ensuring the essay’s accurate transcription. Further
thanks are due to Dayna Miller at the Kingston University Archives
and Special Collections for facilitating permission to reproduce
the photographs of the edition of Flesh collaged by Brophy for Iris
Murdoch. Thanks also to Sue Beesley for her photographs of Rodney
Hill’s Brophy library.
The Editors would like to give sincere thanks to the Iris Murdoch
Society, Miles Leeson and Carole Sweeney in particular, as well as a
number of other contributors, for contributions in support of pro-
viding the index for this volume.
Finally, Richard Canning wishes to thank his co-editor Gerri
Kimber for her extraordinary editing skills, foresight and patience
throughout. Without her there could have been no book.
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Introduction
Richard Canning
Brigid Brophy (1929–95) was a British – but, by descent, equally
Anglo-Irish – novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, critic,
artist, poet, polemicist, activist and sometime celebrity. Many of her
publications defy generic classifi cation, and so the following sum-
mary of her output might be contested. She was the author of (prob-
ably) eleven works of fi ction, including these eight (or seven?) novels:
Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953), which concerns the relationship between
an ape in London Zoo and a professor observing the animal’s mat-
ing rituals; The King of a Rainy Country (1956), portraying a set of
bohemians in post-war London and Venice; Flesh: a novel (1962),
which recounts the erotic tutelage of an inexperienced husband by
his wife; The Finishing Touch (1963; rev. edn 1987), set in a girls’
fi nishing school in France, which amounts to a fully-realised homage
to Brophy’s novelistic hero Ronald Firbank, while also containing a
portrait of the art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt in fi ctional
and cross-gendering guise as the headmistress; The Snow Ball (1964),
Brophy’s Mozartian novel, whose characters attend a ball dressed as
characters from Don Giovanni; In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel
(1969), one of a tiny handful of novels in English to manage to con-
ceal the anatomical sex of their chief protagonist entirely, with the
further distinction of deploying that utterly contemporary dystopia
the airport lounge as its chief locale; The Adventures of God in his
Search for the Black Girl: A Novel and Some Fables (1973), puns
on George Bernard Shaw’s 1932 parables about religious faith in
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; and lastly
Palace without Chairs: A Baroque Novel (1978), a playful, Shavian
dialogue questioning the nature of democracy, set in an imaginary
Middle European kingdom called Evarchia. Brophy’s writing career
then dramatically and cruelly ended: she was diagnosed with multiple
sclerosis in 1983, in her early fi fties.
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