Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy

As a biographer, Brophy was as keen as anyone to hunt down facts and turn up hitherto unseen documents, but it is her unusual approach to her subjects and the brilliant critical perceptions that result from her research that make her studies of Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank so outstanding and unusual. It seems clear that she was thinking of her own career when she wrote of a novelist in her other more than superficially Firbankian novel, Palace Without Chairs (1978), that he developed ‘a technique for dealing with his imagination when it, uninvited, proffered nuclei of fictions: a few he compressed into short stories, which took a day or two to imagine and write down, but most, even more cleverly, he distorted into sometimes rather brilliant critical perceptions about other writers’ work’. One of the things that characterises Brophy as a writer is this sense that her work is all of a piece, even though the books themselves are very different in form and genre.

This novel was described by Brophy as being written ‘in a superficially Firbankian idiom’, but it in fact pays homage to Firbank in its subject-matter and its many allusions quite as much as in its language and style. This article was complemented, as it were, by The Finishing Touch, which was published the following year. A similarly fruitful exchange between fiction and non-fiction occurred in the case of Firbank, whose The New Rythum and other pieces she reviewed in the London Magazine in October 1962.

Brophy had started her career as a writer of fiction in 1953, and her earliest work of non-fiction, Mozart the Dramatist , was not published until 1964, the same year as her fifth (and most consciously Mozartian) novel, The Snow Ball, in which several people attending an eighteenth-century-themed fancy-dress party adopt the guises (and behaviour) of characters from Don Giovanni. These three short-lived geniuses are the presiding deities in Brophy’s writing: they not only became the subjects of several essays and four works of non-fiction, but are palpable presences in other books. Ronald Firbank, Aubrey Beardsley and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart provided Brigid Brophy, who described herself as ‘a natural, logical and happy atheist’, with an alternative Trinity.

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy