Brigid Brophy Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Corinne E. Blackmer

SOURCE: "The Finishing Touch and the Tradition of Homoerotic Girls' School Fiction," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 32-9.

In the following essay, Blackmer situates The Finishing Touch in the tradition of homoerotic pedagogical fiction, suggesting that the novel "represents an important milestone in the history of lesbian and, more broadly, antihomophobic literature."

Upon her death, the British novelist Sarah Scott (1732–1795) requested that her personal papers, including her intimate correspondence with her longtime companion Barbara Montagu, be destroyed. Yet given the suave, bravura skill with which, two hundred years later, Miss Antonia Mount, the headmistress in Brigid Brophy's comic masterpiece of girls' school homoeroticism The Finishing Touch (1963), negotiates the differences between the appearance of innocently platonic "romantic friendship" and the reality of lesbian sexuality, we might surmise that she has read the occlusions and absences in the tradition of her predecessors as...
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