Brigid Brophy has won herself a small reputation in recent years as one of our leading literary shrews. Irascibly well-meaning, intemperately fond of common sense, she is known to have no time for mysteries or maladjustments. Kind to animals, cruel to lettuce, afraid of Virginia Woolf, she is mad about marriage, Mozart, Watteau and champagne. Her tone is hectoringly superior. She knows that sense cannot be all that common, since she has so much of it and others have so little. A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight. But she has been compensatingly indulgent to young, up-and-coming female novelists, and a mere whiff of the rococo makes her head spin.

Being right, though, is a solitary calling and for her latest publication B. B. has called in reinforcements, in the shape of Michael Levey (her husband) and Charles Osborne (Assistant Literature Director of the Arts Council). Just as in Don't Never Forget she packaged for posterity her merest book reviews, she has now had the idea of immortalizing her after-dinner conversation. Nibbling a nut roast, sipping a last glass of champagne, she has steered the brilliant conversation round to one of her favourite talking points: those Great Books to which the Eng. Lit. operators have persuaded us to pay Dutiful Homage but which, if we were really honest, we would admit are pretty second-rate. Neither Mr. Levey (who is Deputy Keeper of the National Gallery) nor Mr. Osborne is noted in his official role for iconoclastic demolition of old, over-rated objets d'art. But they seem to have pitched in with zest and the upshot is yet another volume we would gladly do without.

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without is little more than a compendium of flaunted smartness. Creaking wit, determined spleen, thin, anxious ironies. All the symptoms of an exhausted social eagerness are on display. The aim is for outrageousness, a superb refusal to be lulled by other people's tepid, idle judgments. The effect is of a damp impertinence. A good number of the chosen (or unchosen) works are easy sport, and a few really do deserve oblivion, but they are hounded with a good deal more ineptness than they can themselves be blamed for. And when this fanged trio set about, say, Jane Eyre or The Scarlet Letter, we can merely smile. Similarly, when Whitman is written off with a "what is one to say of this garrulous old bore?" (which garrulous old bore?) and Hopkins as "a mental cripple", or when we are instructed that "the man must have a heart of stone who could raise a laugh at Volpone", or when Defoe and Fielding and Smollett are all found to be as "red-faced as the brick houses of the [Georgian] period, but quite without their elegance and form"—whose mud is in whose eye? A sample of B. L. O.'s intricate textual criticism should put paid to any doubts. Here they are, on Wordsworth's "Daffodils":

The implication is that to gaze and gaze at them is good for the health or the soul—perhaps even for the income. After all, Wordsworth claimed that gazing has brought him "wealth". Perhaps that's why he called these quintessentially yellow flowers "golden".

What acumen, what rigour! Is nothing sacred? Well, some things are—as a glance at Miss Brophy's old novel reviews will confirm. Janice Elliot, Hortense Calisher, Kathryn Perutz—it is to make room for talents of this magnitude that she would have us ditch the Brontës.