Why This Rather Than That?”

An accomplished journalist and literary critic, Brigid Brophy was also a prolific novelist. Among her eleven works of fiction, she wrote The King of a Rainy Country, In Transit, and Flesh, all of which, in very different ways, address changing ideas of gender and sexuality in postwar Britain, anticipating later feminist debates on essentialism and the cultural construction of gender. Difficult to categorize by either literary movement or style, Brophy’s novels are notable for their experiments with the conventions of realism. Examining the reception of Brophy’s work in its literary and intellectual contexts, as well as reading some of her nonfiction writing on women’s rights, sexuality, and literary form, this article also offers a brief introduction to these novels and suggests that a recent revival of critical interest in Brophy’s work helps to broaden our understanding of the history of contemporary women’s literature

Aesthetics · Art · Categorization · Epistemology · Essentialism · Human sexuality · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literature · Reading (process · Realism · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Irish and British Studies · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy

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• Gender Trouble

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