Where to Start with Iris Murdoch: A Reading Guide

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was the Irish-British novelist and philosopher whose twenty-six novels — produced over four decades — made her one of the most substantial and most discussed literary figures of postwar Britain. She was also a significant moral philosopher, whose The Sovereignty of Good (1970) argued for a return to attention, love, and the reality of goodness as the foundations of moral life. Her novels put these concerns into narrative form: they are comedies of obsession and self-deception, populated by people who misunderstand themselves and the people they love, who exercise power over others while imagining themselves liberated, and who are occasionally granted moments of genuine moral vision. She won the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea in 1978; she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1987; and she died in 1999 after several years with Alzheimer’s disease, the subject of John Bayley’s celebrated memoir about their marriage.

Where to Start: The Sea, the Sea (1978)

The essential Murdoch — and the novel most readers find easiest to enter. Charles Arrowby, a celebrated theatrical director, retires to a remote house on the English coast to write his memoirs and shed the complications of his London life. He discovers that the woman he loved at eighteen — Hartley, whose loss he has told himself he has never recovered from — is living in the nearby village, apparently in an ordinary, unhappy marriage. His conviction that he must rescue her, and his inability to see the situation as anything other than a confirmation of his romantic mythology about himself, is the novel’s engine.

Murdoch renders Charles with extraordinary precision: he is vain, solipsistic, capable of real affection, and entirely unable to distinguish between love and possession. The novel is a comedy in the deepest sense — not funny, exactly, but a demonstration of the gap between human self-understanding and human reality. Her most gripping narrative and the most immediate entry to her world.

The Black Prince (1973)

Murdoch’s most formally inventive novel — and her most explicit engagement with the philosophy of art and eros. Bradley Pearson, a fifty-eight-year-old tax inspector and minor novelist, falls catastrophically in love with Julian Baffin, the twenty-year-old daughter of his rival and friend. The novel is framed by prefaces from the characters who dispute Pearson’s account, making every chapter an argument about the reliability of self-knowledge.

The novel is partly a meditation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet — Julian is writing an essay on the play when Bradley falls in love with her; the ‘Black Prince’ of the title is Hamlet himself — and on the relationship between art and eros, between genuine creativity and the kind of creative vanity that mistakes itself for the real thing. Her most ambitious single novel.

Reading Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s fiction is built on a single philosophical insight: that love, as most people practice it, is a form of attention to themselves rather than to others — a projection of their needs, fantasies, and self-images onto the people they claim to love. Her novels dramatise this insight in comic and tragic terms, with characters who are brilliant, passionate, and utterly unable to see the people they desire. The moral achievement she points toward — genuine attention to another person, love that respects their reality — is glimpsed but rarely sustained. Begin with The Sea, the Sea for the most immediately gripping and the most accessible; read The Black Prince for the most formally ambitious and the most philosophically rich.