"The Finishing Touch" is set in a girls' boarding school on the French Riviera where the headmistresses are all lesbians who put the "finishing touch" to the education of the young women under their care by introducing them to the pleasures of Sapphic love. One of Brophy's favorite writers was the gay novelist Ronald Firbank and "The Finishing Touch" was written in a style that paid homage to his thinly veiled homoerotic novels. One of Brophy's principle heroes since childhood was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose music and operas she adored. "The Snow Ball", a comedy of manners set in modern London is a tribute to Mozart's operas, and many reviewers noted "The Snow Ball" was also something of a game as Brophy contrived to put in as references to Mozart's work and life into her novel as possible. In the same year that "The Snow Ball" was published, Brophy also published "Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age", a Freudian psycho-analytical account of Mozart and his work. Critical reception to "Mozart the Dramatist" was mixed with some praising her for an original and well researched account of Mozart's life while others being exasperated by her psychoanalytical approach. In the "Hudson Review", Joseph Kerman wrote a hostile review that concluded: "I do not think that Miss Brophy knows quite what she is up to...Criticism is not psychoanalysis." Brophy was friends with Charles Osborne, the editor of "London Magazine", who often solicited articles from her. Brophy's articles together with frequent appearances on television in the 1960s-1970s created the image of her as the "enfant terrible" of British literature as she was outspoken in praising writers and artists she liked while being vociferous in denouncing those she disliked. Besides for literature, Brophy frequently wrote about and spoke out on social and political issues. The principle issues that engaged her were feminism; animal rights; gay rights; opposition to the strict censorship laws that existed in Britain until the 1960s; making vivisection illegal; demanding changes in British publishing laws as she believed that the current laws allowed publishers to benefit financially at the expense of writers; and a general opposition to marriage and monogamy as "oppressive".. Through in fact a very shy woman who was uncomfortable in social settings, her "enfant terrible" image led to widespread perception of her as an abrasive and opinionated scold who was forever pushing to do away with residual Victorian values, much to her distress.