Brigid Brophy

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Brigid Brophy (12 June 1929 – 7 August 1995) was an English author, literary critic and outspoken campaigner for social reform. She wrote stories, novels, plays and non-fiction, and became a familiar figure on television and in newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Ealing to writer John Brophy and his wife Charis, she had a restless schooling and won a scholarship to study classics at Oxford at age 15, though she did not complete her degree. She married art historian Michael Levey in 1954; they had a daughter, Katharine. Brophy also had important relationships with Iris Murdoch and later Maureen Duffy; after Duffy left in 1979 she faced a difficult period with illness.

Her first book, The Crown Princess, appeared in 1953, followed by Hackenfeller's Ape, her first novel inspired by the roar of lions at London Zoo. She wrote many other notable works, including The Snow Ball (1964) and In Transit (1969). She also wrote The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973) and Palace Without Chairs (1978), and a children's book Pussy Owl (1976). Brophy was also a sharp critic and advocate, writing on Mozart, Firbank, and many social topics. Her article The Rights of Animals (1965) helped push the animal rights movement, and she led a campaign with the Writers Action Group to win the Public Lending Right, which pays authors when their books are borrowed from libraries; the law passed in 1979. She was a vegetarian from age 25 and campaigned for animal welfare and other causes. She began to have mobility problems in the 1980s and lived in Lincolnshire from 1991 until her death in 1995.