An Interview with Brigid Brophy

Abstract

Novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist, Brigid Brophy is an Anglo-Irishwoman who lives in England. Her childhood was spent in London, yet, since her father, the novelist John Brophy, was fervently Irish, she visited Ireland frequently and was brought up on Irish ideas. As a child she appeared briefly in a film, was bathed by T. E. Lawrence, and wrote verse dramas from the age of six onwards. After attending Oxford for four terms, Brophy was, in effect, expelled for indiscretions. She then took a variety of clerical jobs, published a volume of short stories, and began work on her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape (1953). While writing it she met Michael Levey, who is now her husband and director of the National Gallery. With their daughter Kate, Levey and Brophy live in an elegant four-room flat on the Old Brompton Road in London, where the interview took place on July 17, 1975. Since 1953, when her first volume was published, Brophy's output has been extensive: six novels, two collections of short prose fiction, one play, four nonfiction works, a critical collection written in collaboration with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, and numerous articles. Her best-known novels are The King of a Rainy Country (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963), and In Transit (1969). Black Ship to Hell (1956), her first nonfiction work, is a lengthy treatment of Freudianism and rationalism which, combined with her classicism, are the underpinnings of her critical stance. Her essays, both topical and critical, treat issues and the arts from a psychological and rational standpoint. In England Brophy is known both for her fiction and as a proponent of human and animal rights who writes and speaks out in favor of vegetarianism, onducted by Leslie Dock