This critical pursuit of the queer modernist Ronald Firbank (1886– 1926) focuses on the neglected play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), but is equally a reflective account of writing on Firbank in the wake of Brigid Brophy's achievements. Almost exclusively among his critics, Brophy not only recognised this play's significance in relation to Firbank's wider importance, but she traced it through many inspired close readings and often provocative biographical and contextual references. In her unique approach to biographical-critical literary studies, Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank (1973; hereafter PN), Brophy deftly pursued her subject, exposing his creative instincts, formal methods and literary resourcefulness. She equally – often acidly – reacted to the very different perspectives of her predecessor Miriam Benkovitz's Ronald Firbank: A Biography (1969).

The digital age offers the twenty-first-century literary critical biographer almost limitless opportunity to review Brophy's critical judgements, and to revisit both these and the ‘Brophyan method’ – sometimes extending these further; sometimes subjecting them to critique or restraint. This essay strongly defends Brophy's radical, ingenious ‘defence of fiction in the form of a critical biography’ of Firbank, celebrating her approach while simultaneously complementing her findings and – occasionally – querying them. New findings, however, are always secured on the back of Brophy's industry, and by way of my co-option of distinctly ‘Brophyan’ methods.

‘Pursuing’ Firbank and ‘penetrating’ his works necessitates scrutiny of PN – unquestionably Brophy's greatest non-fictional publication, as celebrated in Peter Parker's 1995 essay ‘“Aggressive, Witty and Unrelenting”: Brigid Brophy and Ronald Firbank’. For the critic and biographer of Firbank, the pursuit is akin to riding in a sidecar, with Brophy in the saddle. Overwhelmingly the speed and forceful directedness of Brophy as critic-biographer motorcyclist proves invigorating. On rarer occasions it can frustrate, as false leads are pursued, the occasional wrong turn is taken, and a few vital pathways are neglected.