[In the following obituary, Lyall summarizes Brophy's life and career achievements.]

Brigid Brophy, a novelist, critic, essayist and crusader for myriad causes ranging from better royalty payments for writers to better treatment for animals, died on Monday at a nursing home in Lincolnshire, England. She was 66 and had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for many years.

Miss Brophy was the author of 4 plays, 7 novels and 14 other books, but she is just as well known for her most successful campaign, for landing rights for authors. In 1979, her efforts resulted in a law that for the first time allowed authors to receive royalty payments from the British Government every time their books were checked out of a public library.

But Miss Brophy also campaigned—even from her sickbed—for the rights of women, of prisoners and of animals. She was a vice president of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, and no animal escaped her sympathy. She even became active in an anti-angling campaign; and at one point sent a letter to the fishing correspondent of The Daily Telegraph in which she compared anglers to "thugs who beat up old-age pensioners for fun" and quoted Lord Byron's remark that fishing was "the stupidest of pretended sports."

Brigid Antonia Brophy was born in 1929 in London, the only daughter of the Anglo-Irish novelist John Brophy. She was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and later at Oxford, where she excelled as a scholar but was soon expelled because of drunken, raucous behavior. She was acting, she later wrote, in the belief that I had more to learn by pursuing my personal life than from textual emendation, with the result that the authorities could put up with me for only just over a year.

"I came down at the age of 19 without a degree and with a consequent sense of nudity which I have never quite overcome."

In 1954, before she was even 30, she burst onto the literary scene when her novel Hackenfeller's Ape, about an ape at the London Zoo and its increasingly close relationship to the professor observing its mating habits, won the Cheltenham Literary Festival First Prize for a first novel. Her novels are known for their imagination and acerbic wit, and include The Snow Ball, in which the characters attend a ball dressed as figures from Don Giovanni; Flesh, which she described as "an almost distressingly cold-blooded little story," and In Transit, set, claustrophobically, in an airport transit lounge.

But she also developed a reputation as a sharp thinker and fierce intellectual who liked a good fight, and her nonfiction books tended to have provocative, often mischievous points of view. In 1967 for instance, she was one of the authors of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, an attack on a number of classic books including Jane Eyre, which was likened by the authors to "gobbling a jar-full of school-girl stick-jaw." She also championed the writing of Ronald Firbank in Prancing Novelist (1973), subtitled A Defense of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank.

Miss Brophy, who spoke freely in her early years about her bisexuality and often referred to marriage as "an immoral institution," nonetheless married in 1954. Her husband, the art historian Michael Levey, shared her delight in literature and the arts. He became director of the National Gallery in 1973 and was knighted eight years later.

In a tribute to Miss Brophy in The Independent on Tuesday, her literary agent, Giles Gordon, described her as a "deeply shy, courteous woman" who wrote delightful thank you letters and kept to rigorous standards in her work. "Woe betide the 'editor' who tried to rewrite her fastidious, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semi-color (or viceversa), or try to spell 'show' other than 'shew,' slavish Shavian that Brophy was," Mr. Gordon wrote.

In 1979, Miss Brophy's physical problem was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, which steadily worsened until she was housebound and had to use a wheelchair. She remained at home, looked after by paid companions, friends, and her husband, who in 1987 quit his job to help care for her. But she continued to work with all the energy her illness would allow. In 1987 she published Baroque 'n' Roll, a collection of essays in which she outlined, with lucidity and detail, the debilitating toll her condition had taken on her. Eventually, her condition deteriorated so badly that she had to move into the nursing home where she died.

She is survived by her husband and a daughter, Kate.