SOURCE: "Desperately Seeking Susan[na]: Closeted Queens and Mozartean Gender Bending in Brigid Brophy's The King of a Rainy Country," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 23-31.

In the following essay, Smith examines the latent homosexuality and postponed heterosexuality in The King of a Rainy Country, relating these themes to various narrative plot conventions that structure Brophy's novel.

At first glance (and perhaps second and subsequent glances) Brigid Brophy's second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, might not seem an Ur-text of lesbian postmodernity. Like many of its earliest critics, Charles J. Rolo found it merely "a curious sort of comedy" concerned with "the romantic temperament" and "youthfulness of spirit." Indeed, in the midfifties, long before postmodernity was consciously defined as a mode of "playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness, [and] fragmentation," Brophy's slippage-ridden text must have seemed to many readers (if not most) little...