Brigid Brophy; British Novelist, Social Iconoclast

Brigid Brophy, a novelist and a leading figure in the 1960s “permissive society,” when Britons threw off many of the social and sexual restrictions of an earlier age, has died at age 66.

The witty, acerbic intellectual, stricken by multiple sclerosis in 1981, died Monday at a nursing home at Louth, 130 miles north of London, her family said.

The daughter of Irish novelist John Brophy, she became a student at Oxford University in 1947 but was thrown out a year later for “unspecified offenses.” She left without a degree and went on to write 10 novels and 11 nonfiction works and become a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her first success was “Hackenfeller’s Ape,” a 1953 fantasy about a laboratory primate that becomes attached to a professor observing its mating ritual.

In 1969, Times reviewer Rosalind Levitt praised Ms. Brophy as an “experimentalist” and noted that her book “In Transit,” which asked readers to become as well as observe a character, was “highly entertaining.”

“ ‘In Transit’ is a roller-coaster ride for and through the mind,” the reviewer wrote, “with all the attendant risks, thrills, threats of nausea (when labored) and dizzy contemplation of known terrain from unfamiliar heights and angles (when most interesting).”

Ms. Brophy’s other novels include “The King of a Rainy Country” (1956), “Flesh” (1962), “The Finishing Touch” (1963), “The Snow Ball” (1964) and “Palace Without Chairs” (1978).

Her nonfiction works include “Black Ship to Hell” (1962), in which she attacked concepts of realism and naturalism in the English novel; “Black and White: a Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley” (1968), and two essay collections, “Baroque ‘n’ Roll” (1987) and “Reads” (1989).

Ms. Brophy was also a fervent defender of animal rights, feminism and prison reform. Her battle for authors rights paid off in 1979 with the passing of a law entitling writers to a fee each time their books are borrowed from public libraries.

Openly bisexual, Ms. Brophy married art historian Michael Levey in 1954. He later became director of the National Gallery, a position he resigned from in 1987 to care for her. She is survived by her husband and their daughter, Kate.