[Prancing Novelist, a study of Ronald Firbank,] is an imaginative pursuit of a writer absolutely outstanding in the tenacity of its research and in its sympathetic and enlightening speculation.

It is also a book co-ordinated with the relentlessness of an obsession, complexly self-referring and never deterred from its chosen objective. Brophy is entirely serious in her task, and is prepared to defend her seriousness. Her polemical writing has tended to receive the bored and insensitive criticism often awarded, in this country, to the upholding of beliefs and the life of genuine moral principle. And a morality of this kind, when brought to bear on the creation of fiction, introduces particular qualities. While Eliot could joke that James (a writer Brophy loves) had a mind so pure that no idea could violate it, Brophy's is a mind vitally concerned with ideas and principles and their manifestation in human behaviour. Equally her belief in the power of the imaginative worlds of novels is strong; she has written of the novel as the only art-form which exacts from its audience a total surrender of the Ego…. (pp. 134-35)

Hackenfeller's Ape (1953) involves us. It has a control rare in a first novel, and a compelling lucidity of style, entirely spare and relevant. The story itself is simple, the implications complex. The larger part of it is set in London Zoo. By clever manipulation of tone and angle man is considered in the context of 'other-than-human animals', in shifts of pathos and illusion about the ape of the title. Though humanised by the name of Percy and by the friendly Professor Darrelhyde's imagination, the monkey retains its instinctual life that is coloured by fear and (the novel's final word) wrath. The book makes profound points without any raising of the voice, and is funnier and more disturbing for this restraint.

In this novel man is observed with repugnance, but a repugnance which occasionally aches for remission in art. The spindly Professor turns himself into the Countess of Figaro, and Marcus, in Flesh (1962), imaginatively (and almost physically) turns himself into a Rubens woman. The author approaches people as both disgusting and capable of refinement and sensibility. Marcus, an appallingly gauche youngish Jew, is rescued from social inadequacy by an aesthetic sense which is enlarged in him by the girl who becomes his wife. Released from the unrecognised sensitivity which makes him interesting he lapses through inherited wealth into corpulence and laziness, sheer self-indulgence.

The principal agent of this change is his discovery of sex itself—a sensual rather than a sentimental education. The guilt subconsciously associated with sex, and which rewards it eventually with death, is an element in Don Giovanni; and a fascination with Mozart, which effectively contributes to the earlier two novels, becomes a dominant concern in The Snow Ball of 1964 (the year of Brophy's excellent and penetrating Mozart the Dramatist). The novel constitutes a kind of commentary on Don Giovanni, and is tainted rather with the enthusiasm of the amateur (in the French sense) who cannot resist drawing her characters into extended chat on subjects dear to the author. One hesitates or is even repelled to investigate an author's work along guidelines too specifically suggested, and a certain deliberateness of intention mars this novel—a defect present too in the overworked style, in which descriptive similes are followed through and repeated with remorseless thoroughness. This indigestible manner was developed further in the ensuing In Transit.

What The Snow Ball does insist on is a more intense examination of the ambiguous repulsion and lure of the flesh, and the manner itself encourages a Pope-like fastidious minuteness of description and disenchanted, dehumanised vision of the grotesque physicality of persons. Brophy Dickensianly turns her people into animals, and her crowds into inanimate seas and baroque sculptures. The snow ball (function) is presided over by a hideous baroque Cupid whom Anna, the principal character, thinks can save the world. But the love that finds expression in the novel is random unsatisfactory sex (couched in theoretical conversation) rather than more constructive relationships. It may be that like Firbank's Cardinal Pirelli, Brophy feels that 'the world is all love, only no one understands'—but her novel's achievement is to show how hard it is for people to believe constructively in a repellent humanity. The author again seems, like Anna, to find it 'easier to like animals than people. And things than animals'. The frigidity of the snow ball (missile) infects the reader with a heavy dissatisfaction, finally declining, like Don Giovanni, to endorse the copulative comedy and offering only the thought of death, and death itself. (p. 135)