Hackenfeller's Ape

by Brigid Brophy

A “pointed and amusing satire” (TIME) of animal rights from a trailblazing twentieth-century writer and activist.

Publication Date: 10/13/2026

Paperback ISBN: 9781628976731

eBook ISBN: 9781628976748

Description

At the London Zoo, Professor Clement Derrylhyde has been studying Percy and Edwina, a pair of Hackenfeller’s Apes, for some time: serenading them with Mozart, learning their habits, hoping to witness the mating of this endangered species. Percy observes him back through the bars of his enclosure, wary of a species that is both captor and companion. When the Professor learns that the zoo has sold Percy to a government space program and that the ape is due to be launched on a one-way rocket trip in a matter of days, he teams up with a plucky young lockpick named Gloria in the hopes of securing Percy’s freedom. 

In a prescient, provocative novella written almost a decade before the first animal was sent into outer space, Brigid Brophy meditates on the human tendency towards violence and self-alienation. At once fable and comedy, gallivanting heist adventure and elegant philosophical treatise, Hackenfeller’s Ape reveals the human animal inside of us all.

Biographical Information

Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was an Irish-English author, literary critic, essayist, and polemicist. Born in London to writer John Brophy, Brophy studied Classics at St. Hugh’s College, and was influenced by writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and Sigmund Freud. Alongside writing, Brophy was an avid activist who championed several types of social reform, including vegetarianism, humanism, and animal rights. She was a staunch feminist and pacifist, writing columns opposing the Vietnam War and openly rejecting sexual orthodoxy along with her partner, art historian Michael Levey.