Giles Cooper, the one-time agent of Brigid Brophy, wrote in his obituary of her that ‘[h]er greatest literary disappointment, I believe, was that Michael Holroyd, not she, was approached by the Society of Authors to write George Bernard Shaw's biography’. The Society of Authors in the early 1970s wanted a biographer who had not known Shaw personally, but who had a proven ability in writing biography and who had demonstrated an interest in Shaw. This put Brophy in the front running. She had written widely about Shaw in essays and reviews, with more than passing mentions in her critical studies of Mozart, Ronald Firbank and two of Aubrey Beardsley, all involving research into a wide variety of sources – some abroad, and not all in English.

The two on Beardsley are particularly relevant. One was a critical appreciation (Black and White, 1968), and the other a biography (Beardsley and his World, 1976). Both upped the status of Beardsley, and in 1976, Kenneth Clark, the director of the National Gallery (and the boss of Brophy's husband, Michael Levey) was asked by the New York Review of Books ‘to write a piece on Beardsley to coincide with the publication of a short, useful book by Brigid Brophy in which, unfortunately, she had repressed her gift of critical insight and has concentrated on the facts of Beardsley's life’. He added later: ‘The facts of his early life have recently been collected in a scholarly manner by Brigid Brophy.’

The combination of critical insight and factual accuracy comes across in Brophy's review of the biographer Miriam Benkovitz, who had also written a study of Beardsley (and Firbank): ‘To write with complete accuracy to any set of facts is hard even for the diligent and self-critical. I think with rue of a couple of hal-finaccuracies in my own recent book on Beardsley.’ This desire for accuracy of expression was in part derived from Shaw.