There was a time, in the sixties and early seventies, when no one needed an introduction to Brigid Brophy. She was one of the most controversial writers in England—occupying a position somewhat like Camille Paglia's today—and here in the States her books were published by the best New York houses and widely reviewed. Now, unfortunately, most of her books are out of print on both sides of the Atlantic and few readers under forty recognize the name. Some of the reasons for this neglect are understandable: she didn't publish a novel after 1978, and a debilitating struggle with multiple sclerosis over the last fifteen years of her life sharply curtailed her writing career. Also, she was cursed for being too far ahead of her time: in her 1953 novel Hackenfeller's Ape she was writing about animal rights long before the cause became popular, and in 1969 wrote the definitive novel about gender confusion (In Transit) long before there was a critical context for the topic. But any informed reckoning of twentieth-century literature must take Brophy's work into account: not only her nine books of fiction, but a career's worth of sharp, intelligent essays (most gathered into three collections), books on Mozart, Freud, and Beardsley, and a 600-page tour de force "defence of fiction in the form of a critical biography of Ronald Firbank," Prancing Novelist.

Her literary career began early. Born in 1929, she was reading authors like Firbank at the age of five (as she reports in an excellent interview with Leslie Dock in Contemporary Literature) and from age six onwards was writing verse dramas. When she was fifteen she wrote an early version of "The Late Afternoon of a Faun," which appeared in her first book, The Crown Princess and Other Stories, published in 1953 when she was twenty-four. Later that same year she published her first novel, Hackenfeller's Ape, which won the Cheltenham Literary Festival prize for best first novel. Brophy later dismissed The Crown Princess as too mainstream—I think it's better than that—but Hackenfeller's Ape, as Mark Axelrod shows in his essay, demonstrated her ability at an early stage to integrate a variety of themes and concerns (Mozart, original sin, vivisection) in a form owing as much to music as to literature. (Baroque architecture would become an additional model for her novels.) Mozart and musical (specifically operatic) form dominates many of her early works: her charming second novel, The King of a Rainy Country (1956), relies heavily on Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (as Patricia Juliana Smith notes in her insightful essay in [Review of Contemporary Literature]) just as her dazzling fifth novel, The Snow Ball (1964), relies on his Don Giovanni. (In the same year she published her nonfiction study Mozart the Dramatist, widely hailed as one of the best books on his operas, and recently reprinted both in Britain and the U.S.)

Brophy's third novel, Flesh (1962), is an unusual novel about the effect of marriage on an awkward, unsociable man that plays against the Pygmalion theme. Dedicated to Iris Murdoch, this story of north London Jews was her first popular success. It was followed by her fourth and most elliptical book of fiction, The Finishing Touch (1963), a wickedly clever novella—half Firbank, half Colette—about a lesbian-run girls' finishing school on the French Riviera. Corinne E. Blackmer explores its literary heritage in detail in [Review of Contemporary Literature] and correctly praises it as "an important milestone in the history of lesbian and, more broadly, antihomophobic literature."

Brophy was in her element in the iconoclastic sixties. She became notorious for her views on vegetarianism, sexual freedom, animal rights, writers' rights (she played a major role in Britain's current Public Lending Right, by which authors are paid a royalty whenever their books are checked out of libraries), women's rights, pornography (pro), and educational reform (contra religion in school, pro Greek), promoting her views on television and radio as well as in print. The same year she published Flesh (1962) she published a long nonfiction work entitled Black Ship to Hell, a rigorous Freudian reading of the dynamics of hate, compared by the London Telegraph to Norman O. Brown's Life against Death. The best of her essays and reviews were published in book form in 1966 under the title Don't Never Forget, and have lost none of their bite, wit, and lightly worn erudition thirty years later. With her husband Michael Levey and friend Charles Osborne she collaborated on the cheeky Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without (1967), and the following year she wrote the first of two books on the 1890s artist Aubrey Beardsley. Also in 1968 she published a book version of her 1967 play, The Burglar, with a long, Shavian introduction (she has written other, unproduced, plays).

The decade came to an explosive climax in 1969 with her masterpiece, In Transit. Several essays [in Review of Contemporary Literature] deal with this extraordinary novel, and several more would be needed to encompass its achievement. As the ambiguously named narrator sits in an international airport waiting for a connecting flight, he/she suffers a kind of gender amnesia and goes through a series of comic attempts to discover his/her sex. The novel is a riot of multilingual puns, parodies, opera allusions, typographical high jinks (one thinks of roughly contemporary books like William H. Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife and Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru), and should be a locus classicus for today's gender critics and advocates of experimental fiction.

The next few years were spent researching and writing her massive book on Firbank, which was met largely by uncomprehending reviews, most questioning the wisdom of using Firbank, of all people, on whom to erect a theory of creative fiction. Once again, Brophy was years ahead of the pack, for only now in the nineties is Firbank becoming recognized for the subversively innovative writer he is. In 1973 she also published her second collection of short fiction, The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl; it's a lively if somewhat miscellaneous collection, some of the pieces a mere page, the title fable novella-length. Then in 1978 she published her final novel, Palace without Chairs, an oddly muted fairy tale set in an imaginary Eastern European socialist monarchy, somewhat in the vein of Firbank's Flower beneath the Foot. After that, Brophy wrote very little; two collections of her essays were published in the 1980s, supplementing (and in some cases reprinting) those in her 1966 collection Don't Never Forget. She died on 7 August 1995, a few weeks before this issue went to press.

The neglect of this brilliant woman's work and contributions to contemporary aesthetics is scandalous, and I hope the essays in this issue begin a long-running critical engagement with her body of work. In the afterward to Reads, Brophy says she took the title of her first essay collection from Mozart's attempt at English in a friend's album—"Don't never forget your faithfull friend"—because "I consider it vital that human beings never should forget Mozart." Those human beings who study contemporary literature never should forget Brophy.