That situation, often manifesting itself in the form of a dilemma, struck her as the novel’s primary concern. We glimpse them in continually evolving contexts inflected with our own agendas, which may also remain mysterious to us.

Her books are full of passion and disaster I loved her as a teenager and will never stop.”Ī crucial idea in Murdoch’s fiction is the reality of others, a material fact that we are confronted with daily but, in our innermost selves, seem hardly able to grasp. Her characters speak the way we would all speak if we did not feel obliged to mask our true, unhinged psyches with the trappings of normality.” She understood our secret lives: falling in love with the wrong person, maddened with inconvenient lust, sadness and fear Charlotte Mendelsonįor Charlotte Mendelson, who has written the introduction to Under the Net (1954), Murdoch’s novels “work for everyone because she understood our secret lives: falling in love with exactly the wrong person, maddened with inconvenient lust and sadness and fear. “People fall in and out of love at breakneck speed, and act in the most undignified and preposterous ways for reasons so insubstantial or intensely personal that it is hard to identify with them unless you perceive yourself to be equally ridiculous and changeable – which I absolutely do. “What I love most about Murdoch’s writing is its accuracy in portraying the human experience at its most passionate and comically absurd,” says the novelist Sophie Hannah, who has written the introduction to Murdoch’s reissued 1973 novel The Black Prince.

Last year, when I took part in the Cheltenham literary festival’s annual Booker prize event – a classy balloon debate to determine who might have won the prize in the years before its invention – Murdoch’s The Bell(1958), championed by Madeleine Thien, only narrowly lost out to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. D o Iris Murdoch’s novels still matter to people? Or, after the high-water mark of her Booker-winning 1978 novel, The Sea, The Sea, and a late period of longer, more philosophically abstruse books, did her work collapse into her biography – the jumble of love affairs, absurdly messy kitchens and Alzheimer’s disease that were dramatised by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the 2001 film of her life? And, once the attention paid to her life had abated, had contemporary fiction simply moved on?Ī set of reissues to mark her centenary this week suggest that her 26 novels still resonate with novelists such as Sarah Perry, Daisy Johnson and Garth Greenwell, who have written new introductions to the works.

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch