The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy – January Evening Bookclub

£9.99

Purchase of this bookclub ticket includes a copy of The Snow Ball which can be collected from the shop or posted out from 29 December.

Available – Ready for despatch or collection within 5 - 7 days

ISBN: 113128 Category: Tag:

Description

First published in 1964, The Snow Ball is arguably Brigid Brophy’s most brilliant fictional performance, consummately melding her avid interests in opera, sexuality and psychology.

It is New Year’s Eve in London. The occasion is a costume ball on an eighteenth-century theme in the grand London residence of Tom and four-times-married Anne. Anna K attends alone, dressed as Donna Anna from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, unhappily preoccupied by her age and appearance and a general distaste for the occasion. But when at midnight she meets a masked Don who kisses her on the mouth, she wonders if this mystery man might share her personal obsessions – ‘Mozart, sex and death’ – and whether a closer union is not meant to be.

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) was a prize-winning British novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism, prison reform and Public Lending Right. Her celebrated debut novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape, was published in 1953. It was followed by many other acclaimed novels including The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball (which Faber are reissuing with a new foreword by Eley Williams), as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. Brophy’s marriage to art historian Michael Levey encompassed a thirteen-year relationship with Iris Murdoch. She died in 1995.