Finishing Touch

by Brigid Brophy

The tweedy Miss Hetty Braid worships the lovely but selfish Miss Antonia Mount, her co-proprietor at the most exclusive finishing school on the French Riviera. The girls they teach are quite remarkable, though hardly in the sense of academic distinction. But trouble looms when Antonia announces that 'Royalty is coming.' The great day arrives, and though at first things go tolerably well, disaster springs from good intentions.

Genres: Fiction, Queer Lit, LGBT, British Literature, 20th Century

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."

She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.

Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."

Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.

Reviews

[Hugh]

Having enjoyed Brophy's The Snow Ball earlier this year, I couldn't resist picking this one up when I saw it in the library. This one is more farcical in tone but still very enjoyable - it gained a new readership when it was revealed that its central character, the finishing school headmistress Antonia Mount, was inspired by Anthony Blunt.

The plot is frothy and the characters are all caricatures, but the linguistic dexterity and playfulness made it great fun to read, though readers will need to know a little French to get the most out of it.

[Jonathan Norton]

Very short novel clearly written in homage of Ronald Firbank, including a passing allusion to Cardinal Pirelli. A lesbian couple run a finishing school on the French Riviera for the hopeless unwanted offspring of the wealthy; they are notified that an English princess is to be placed in their care. I only have the original 1963 edition so I don't know what changed in the "revised" version of 1987.

[Tom Hurst]

With a plot like a highbrow Carry On film, this short novel, first published in 1963, combines campy sex-comedy farce with recherché lesbian and gay references and a disorienting style peppered with French vocabulary (I kept a translation app to hand).

Delicate, manipulative, self-absorbed Antonia and her long-suffering, downtrodden partner Hetty run a fancy but somewhat questionable ladies’ finishing school, which is shaken up by the arrival of “royalty”. Will this change lead to honour and success?

Antonia is a fairly monstrous creation and the source of much of the comedy. Her affectations, snobbery and obsessions are woven into the telling, in a strange mix of third and first person. I found it quite a quick read despite the obscure style.

[Tom Leland]

It is rare and only with self-loathing that I don't finish a book.
It is in some ways unfair for me to give this a 1 -- but I feel there's more
value in one giving their honest appraisal of how a book affected them
than in giving a rating based on how they think they should've been affected,
or while knowing full well that another sensibility might find it wonderful.

I could hardly make heads or tails of this. Would help a bit to speak French,
though I doubt it would've changed my rating.

[Benedict Reid]

This is a physically beautiful book. I loved holding it, and the cover and type design made for easy reading. But the actual content of the book was arch rather than funny. The use of euphemism and french to imply sex is meant to be intellectual and knowing, but to a modern reader it was hard to distinguish from an episode of Are You Being Served.

[Sara G]

Ah, obnoxious. I found the reading experience incredibly annoying. But I know a lot of people who would love it, and I can't really fault this little story its overbearing pretentiousness on the account of my own personal distaste for it.

[McBean]

Maybe I liked it less cause I had a hard time reading it. Like the French stuff and all. Also not much happened. And the thing that did happen was kinda mediocre. I feel like this is the kind of book that I would read in a classroom and we would be analyzing ever chapter.

[Joyce]

just a little too slender and slight, without the propulsive force of artistic will of firbank at his best

[Ygraine]

do i Get camp modernism ? no. am i therefore at all likely to really Get what brophy is doing here ? probably not. but i had fun w all the sugary, sticky, overripe Slime-Slickness of this.

[Grada (BoekenTrol)]

From one of the book boxes that Moem sent to me. This one looks too interesting to let go without reading. So, I'll host it on my shelf for a while.