Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was an acclaimed novelist, essayist, critic, and activist. She championed gay marriage, prison reform, pacifism, and vegetarianism, as well as campaigning tirelessly for the rights of both animals and authors. She published nine novels-of which The King of a Rainy Country (1956) is her second-as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ronald Firbank, her formidable intellect unhampered by being sent down from Oxford before she could take her degree.

"This pitch-perfect novel, an inquiry into romanticism and disaffection, is witty, unexpectedly moving and a revelation again of Brophy's originality. Entirely of its time, it remains ahead of itself even now . . . in its emotional range and its intellectual and formal blend of stoicism and sophistication."

--Ali Smith

"One of the strangest and wittiest British writers of the past half century . . . A comet in her day."

--Terry Castle

"Brigid Brophy [was] one of the most original and engaging writers and critics of the last century, and it is an enormous pleasure to discover this early novel, first published in 1956 . . . Brophy writes with great wit about the uncertainty of youth. It's sharp, funny and clever, and as fresh as new paint."

--The Times

"There is nobody quite like her, no one who sees the world quite in her original way."

--A.S. Byatt, The Times Literary Supplement

"Wistful and enigmatic, as elusive as its mercurial protagonist, this book is a queer bildungsroman, a farce, and a road trip all rolled into one. Delightfully nonsensical characters speak past one another in witty banter while the plot twists and turns along with them, both careening through the social boundaries of pre-60s London toward more freewheeling social constructs. They're not beatniks or hippies or radicals in the sense of 1950s canon characters; they're bored and broke and listlessly figuring out what kind of lives they could want."

--Miranda Sanchez, Epilogue Books (Chapel Hill, NC)

"It is perhaps fortunate that Miss Brophy's characters are not to be taken too seriously . . . Their creator [has a] fetching prose style, with its bright surfaces of observation, its keen satirical edges, its intricate and precise renderings of vulgar dialogue."

--Ben Crisler, The New York Times Book Review

"The charm of the novel--and there is a great deal of it--is in the detail. And for all how free-wheeling characters and plot seem, there is also some careful construction here . . . The King of a Rainy Country is consistently enjoyable, and a solid and even poignant work."

--M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

"Part of Brophy's brilliance is that the queerness doesn't seem suppressed or coded; instead, it seems to be so much part of the way things are that it hardly needs separate mention. She embeds her schoolgirl romance in a quixotic quest narrative, an existential search for the unrecoverable . . . Her style [is a] revelation . . . Her metaphors are persistently strange and wondrous . . . She should be read with her more famous contemporaries such as Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch for the breadth and incisiveness of her intellect, but she should also be read with sui generis stylists such as Henry Green and Kay Boyle."

--Stacey D'Erasmo, from the Foreword

Publisher: McNally Editions

Pub date: 2025-05-06

Length: 280 pages