SOURCE: Smith, Patricia Juliana. “Desperately Seeking Susan(na): Closeted Quests and Mozartean Gender Bending in Brigid Brophy's The King of a Rainy Country.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15, no. 3 (fall 1995): 23-31.

In the following essay, Smith discusses Brigid Brophy's The King of a Rainy Country as an early lesbian text in which Brophy tries on different roles for women with the freedom afforded by operatic structure.

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.¹ 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 mid-fifties, 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...