Writers No One Reads

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No one reads Brigid Brophy (1929 – 1995) who was a writer, activist, opera enthusiast and animal lover. Fastidious with grammar, she was also an advocate of the Shavian alphabet, most notably in her spelling of show as shew. Her personal life was also unconventional: not only was she bisexual; but she also had an open marriage with Michael Levey, director of The National Gallery between 1963-1987, whom she married in 1954.

Brophy’s love of Mozart figures prominently in her writing. In 1964 she published the nonfictional work Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age. In the same year she published what is arguably her masterpiece, The Snow Ball, which attempts to answer the question she poses in her nonfiction work: “whether, when the opera opens, Don Giovanni has just seduced or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna.”

In between writing, she also somehow found time to champion many causes. An article that appeared in the Sunday Times in 1965 credits her with having triggered the animal rights movement in England. Her most lasting legacy is her campaigning for Public Lending Rights (which gives writers a small sum each time their book is borrowed from a British Public Library) which led to the PLR Act being passed in parliament in March 1979. Tragically, just a few months later, Brophy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her output soon after dwindled.