Brigid Brophy

Who was Brigid Brophy?

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey was a British novelist, critic and campaigner for social reforms, including the rights of authors and animal rights. Among her novels was Hackenfeller's Ape; among her critical studies were Mozart the Dramatist and Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction ... In Praise Of Ronald Firbank. 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, and pornography. She was a 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.

Brophy married art historian Michael Levey in 1954. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1983.