The Snow Ball

(Paperback, Main)

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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.'Written with considerable expertise... An air of indulgent, extravagant corruption and decay glitters over [the novel].' Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was an acclaimed novelist, essayist, critic and campaigner. Her fiction included Hackenfeller's Ape (1953), The King of a Rainy Country (1956), Flesh (1962), The Finishing Touch (1963), The Snow Ball (1964), In Transit (1969), The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (1971) and Palace without Chairs (1978). Her non-fiction included Black Ship to Hell (1962), Mozart the Dramatist (1964), two books about Aubrey Beardsley - Black and White (1968) and Beardsley and His World (1976), and Prancing Novelist: In Praise Of Ronald Firbank (1973). In 1954 she married the art historian Michael Levey (later the director of the British National Gallery from 1973-1987, knighted in 1981). The couple had one daughter, Kate. Brophy was a noted campaigner on several platforms, in particular her fight to establish an authors' Public Lending Right and her vice-presidency of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.