The Crown Princess is a book of six stories by a write still in her early twenties. The best of them show exceptional acuteness Brigid (Antonia) Brophy 1929– © Jerry Bauerand penetrative power, and a wit which is unobtrusive but constant. "He was visible all round, like a statue on a revolving pedestal," Miss Brophy observes of an actor whose public existence is conducted with an egoism so perfect that it excludes the possibility of any inner life at all…. Miss Brophy's approach is quite unlike that of her fashionable British contemporaries who adhere to a cult of feminine sensibility; it is more nearly related to that of such tough and sharp American talents as those of Miss Mary McCarthy and Miss Eleanor Clark. Her material is generally the contrast between outer and inner realities. The Crown Princess, accepting the crowd's applause on her twenty-first birthday, feels so perfectly...