Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in 'Flesh' and 'The Snow Ball'

This chapter considers Brophy’s narrative writing about the experience of sex and sexual intercourse in her novels Flesh (1962) and The Snow Ball (1964). It puts the books in the context of Brophy's own career and of the wider literature and culture of the 1960s. In particular it looks at Brophy's own journalism and critical writing on the issues of sex and censorship, including that on writers such as Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, Francoise Sagan and John Cleland, and applies what she says there to her own fiction writing, in an attempt to sketch out a theory of what is possible and what is commendable in narrative writing about sex.