Brophy, Brigid (Antonia) (1929–1995)

English writer. Opera is a frequent element in her work, for example in the novel The Snow Ball (1964). The narrator of In Transit (1969) is in the predicament of having forgotten his or her sex as well as identity.

Her lives of the artist Aubrey Beardsley (Black and White, 1968) and the writer Ronald Firbank (Prancing Novelist, 1973) were written as much in defence of her own views as the lives of her subjects, both flamboyant dandies. She also campaigned successfully for the introduction in the UK of public lending right.

She was born in London, the daughter of the writer John Brophy (1899–1965), and educated at Oxford University. Her Hackenfeller's Ape (1953) won the Cheltenham Literary Prize for a first novel in 1954. She described her fiction as a study of the struggle between Eros, the life force, and Thanatos, the death force, but she also conveys a belief that human imagination and intelligence can improve the species. In this, and in her use of materials and models, she was influenced by the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Her tone is by turns playful, melancholy, and erotic. Her other works include the novels The King of a Rainy Country (1956), Flesh (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963), and Palace without Chairs (1978); The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl, and other Fables (1973); and a play, The Burglar (1968).