'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 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
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.
