Kate Levey

In Transit by Brigid Brophy Brigid Brophy’s postmodern satire follows a traveler who has lost their gender in an airport lounge, launching a surreal, pun-filled quest that challenges assumptions about identity, language, and reality. buff.ly/Ic2WfrK

In Transit by Brigid Brophy Brigid Brophy’s postmodern satire follows a traveler who has lost their gender in an airport lounge, launching a surreal, pun-filled quest that challenges assumptions about identity, language, and reality. buff.ly/Ic2WfrK

November’s Dalkey Archive Essentials Subscription Pick is… HACKENFELLER’S APE by Brigid Brophy! Subscribe by 11/1 to get your copy: dalkeyarchive.store/products/dal...

Ignore the stern photo! Brigid Brophy's In Transit revels in linguistic license and gender gyration! New USA edition @dalkeyarchive.bsky.social

LOVE this book

Brigid Brophy's prizewinning novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, reissued in USA by @dalkeyarchive.bsky.social Yay!

2026 Reading 53: The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy. Re-read (in Faber’s lovely reissue with Eley Williams’s introduction) because I was going to see Don Giovanni for the first time, an opera which informs (rather than inspires) this novel, that I hold closer to my heart than maybe any other.

This month on the Essentials Blog, Katherine Packert Burke’s new introduction to IN TRANSIT by Brigid Brophy. Read it here: www.deepvellum.org/dalkey-archi...

“Brophy’s novel is a riotous sendup of gender, gender expression, social conventions of all sorts—and, as such, is as relevant today as when it first appeared. A timely reprint of a postmodern masterpiece.” —Starred review, Kirkus Reviews

Brigid Brophy, there, using the rare – the incorrect? – transitive form of the verb ‘to flicker’. I just *know* that I’ve used this, myself, and therefore stolen it from her.

I’ll always honour the sheer balls of Brophy for using, as epigraph to her marvellous novel, a FOOTNOTE from her previous, non-fiction book. And why shouldn’t she? She is, after all, quite as good as she herself thinks she is.I salute her.

I’m preparing, with joyous anticipation, for my first live experience of Don Giovanni, by listening the hell out of it, and reading the divine Brigid Brophy, in both non-fiction and fictional mode. Mozart the Dramatist is rich stuff (veeery Freudian) but The Snow Ball is an absolute favourite novel.

October’s Dalkey Archive Essentials Subscription Pick is IN TRANSIT by Brigid Brophy! A postmodern romp about a traveler who suddenly “loses” their gender and sets out to find it again — Brophy’s comic masterpiece. Subscribe here: dalkeyarchive.store/products/dal...

‘Past times’ in my Devon garden this week #rosewednesday

‘Male gay couples are, to the knowing eye, pretty clearly what they are, but from the start Firbank’s strategy, or perhaps simply his instinct, was to write almost entirely about women.’ Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Hollinhurst on Brophy on Firbank, in the LRB.

Brigid Brophy with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne. Photo by Ken Thompson, 1968. Charles looks very much better than my parents in this!

For a time Stephen Vizinczey lived at Coleherne Court in London, as did my maternal grandmother. Stephen and his wife became friendly with Brigid Brophy, who wrote in praise of his novel, In Praise of Older Women.

'If this anarchic place exists, then Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and Brigid Brophy are its custodians.' PhD @bristolunienglish.bsky.social candidate Alice Hill-Woods reviews Hilary White's The Visual Novel for @thetls.bsky.social www.the-tls.com/literature-b...

Family affair: cover by my father, novel by my mother, Brigid Brophy.

Maureen Duffy, who died in May, was in some respects my third parent. She arrived at our flat each weekday morning and stayed until the late afternoon, but often returned to go out with Brigid Brophy and Michael Levey in the evening. She enlarged my otherwise small family.

Valentine hearts.

DJ Taylor's 2018 radio doc 'The Advance Guard of the Avant-Garde' on experimental 1960s British writers: BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Eva Figes, Brigid Brophy, Rosemary Tonks, Prynne & C Brooke-Rose. Views from Jen Hodgson, Jonathan Coe, Eimear McBride & Jeremy Noel-Tod. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Oh- how *wonderful* is this? Thank you @nguthrie.bsky.social

Just finished my first Brigid Brophy book 'Hackenfeller's Ape' ... 73 years after it was published. Better late than never! Excited to explore more by this author. Here's my review: bit.ly/49Qo7Kl #Booksky 💙📚 #Books 📚 #Literaturesky

Come and join the fabulous panel discussing Iris's poetry at The London Library in March! www.londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on/342...

An unusual two-Brophy post! Brigid Brophy and John Brophy. Thank you @casmilus.bsky.social

Traffic not too bad locally this morning.

Been reading mid-20th century humanist campaigners for prison reform and just come across a description by Brigid Brophy saying in imprisoning people we are ‘burying them alive’. What a powerful image, even more true of conditions today! If you don’t already, do support @thehowardleague.bsky.social

Let Brigid Brophy tickle your brain and bend your mind. Read In Transit.

This is a marvellous Highsmith!

Enjoying *some* of these.

Nothing but these blooming in the garden at present:

Now we're in 2026, it's *ONLY three years* until the centenary of Brigid Brophy's birth, so here's to 2029! Photo of Brigid Brophy (and Antinous) by J. Lewinski.

Featuring, right, an early Brigid Brophy non-fiction volume, Black Ship to Hell, 1962. An interesting read, imo.

@edisky.bsky.social Thank you for reposting! Best wishes, K.

Just your annual reminder that this photo accurately reflects what Brigid Brophy thought of Christmas.

A regal wave to my followers from a sleigh as it was the nearest I could get to a throne!

Himself taste-testing tinsel. Not a good idea.

If you haven't read Brigid Brophy, then do investigate! I doubt she'd thank me, but I think of her as nestling provocatively between Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, with the sly, sometimes savage irony of the former, and the latter's bustling care for her characters. The Snow Ball is my favourite.

Brigid Brophy admired George Bernard Shaw, as one can see in Hackenfeller's Ape, first published in 1953.

Brigid Brophy wrote 7 novels and these are the most recent editions:

[5] Brilliant! I'll say it again. The story is based on Brophy's knowledge of Anthony Blunt, gained via her husband Michael Levey, art historian, who knew him. Published before the revelations about the spying. Happy to find @brophylevey.bsky.social here reminding world about Brigid Brophy. #books

@ianhunt.bsky.social Here is the GMP edition from 1987 with this introduction