The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was difficult to resist. Shy and ethereal with a deep, musical voice, she had a presence, according to Hilary Mantel that ‘was almost overwhelming’ with ‘a heartbreaking simplicity about her, like some simple comforting flower.’ She wrote copious letters (ten per day was usual) and she offered her correspondents kindness, curiosity about their lives, encouragement and affection. Siding with outsiders rather than the establishment, she took hundreds of souls under her wing, offering consolation, nurturing care and financial support. She was also full of impish sexual energy, attracted to men and women. In her fervent pursuit of love, she sometimes hurt those closest to her.

As a young and brilliant woman she was orbited by hordes admirers but by middle age she had transformed into what Martin Amis called ‘a beautiful and benignant nun’ with a swag of young writers, painters, and seekers who paid court. Her friend Angus Wilson said she felt spiritually powerful; as though she could look deeply into people’s souls. Yet her almost Buddha-like stillness hid a tumultuous emotional life and a questing spirit. Her biographer and friend, Peter Conradi recalls that having met her on just a single occasion, she appeared to be

…a mixture of small girl, grande dame, steely-eyed don, warm-hearted mother-confessor, depressed liberal who thought the human race would blow itself up, and a lonely seeker.

While writing her biography he fought to retain the many aspects of her that were contradictory, pointing to the aptness of her name, ‘Iris’, which in Greek mythology is the goddess of rainbows, incorporating all possible colours.

Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six novels tell spellbinding stories that are deeply evocative of states of being, places and activities. They grapple with our most profound moral questions: the battle between good and evil in ourselves and our society; our struggle with truth and love, and the finding of meaning in a world where faith in god is lost. The novels invariably involve a large cast of characters who fall in and out of love with the wrong person, are maddened by passion, fear, obsession, grand ideas, and are frequently rendered ridiculous and undignified. Iris observes her characters clearly but with affection and humour, casting a tolerant eye on their foibles. She avoided neat conclusions and wrote that ‘Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.’ Her characters are multidimensional, contradictory and buffeted by life. Their goodness or intelligence does not save them from pain.

Despite her position as an influential philosopher, Iris always believed that literature was of paramount importance: that owing to its greater accessibility it could touch people’s lives more profoundly. She strove to build a ‘moral psychology’ in her fiction to directly challenge her readers and make them think more deeply about their lives. Yet these challenges are couched in narratives that are always immensely readable.

Two years after her death came Conradi’s official biography (2001), based on twenty of Iris Murdoch’s diaries and thousands of letters. It exposed the life of this extremely private woman to intense scrutiny. What most surprised readers and many friends was the extent to which the complicated plots and emotional drama of these novels mirrored Murdoch’s own highly promiscuous and polyamorous life. It turned out that she was rarely out of love, and often in love with more than one person at a time. This sometimes led to high melodrama: ‘When I am in love I am INSANE’, she wrote to her lover Brigid Brophy, and although such love would shine a ‘glorious’ light on her life, she added that it would often result in ‘anxiety, misery, despair, destruction, inability to work…’

Conradi has justified his revelations of Iris’s promiscuity on the grounds that it demonstrates how her fiction and philosophy explore themes and issues drawn from her own experience.

Early Loves

Iris’s love life was tumultuous from the start. As an undergraduate studying Classics at Oxford in the shadow of the looming war, she had been aware of her power to attract others. She was pretty but not a classic beauty, and most agreed it was her inner quality, a certain beauty of soul, that drew people to her. She wrote to a friend:

I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men all at once – which gives rise to complications and distresses. And too many people are in love with me just at present – which although pleasing to my vanity, is also liable to be annoying and difficult.

Romantic entanglements among her close group of friends at Oxford formed the basis for a number of future novels, including The Book and the Brotherhood which was based on her ‘set’ of university friends. When war broke out and the men were called up, a number of her relationships intensified through sustained correspondence. She became a muse for fellow Oxford undergraduate and poet, Frank Thompson. He had joined the Communist Party for the love of Iris, whom he adored.  During the Second World War he served with the British Special Forces. Over four years their letters affirmed their desire to live ‘vividly, individually, wildly, beautifully’, as she expressed it. While working for the Treasury in London, she wrote to him that she was contemplating tackling a novel:

Jesus God how I want to write. I want to write a long, long & exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself & observe in the characters of others. Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness & poise of a work of art.

Frank, a gentle, brilliant, rebellious man with a horror of violence, was captured alongside Balkan partisans and executed by the Nazis in 1944. He fought and died courageously, shouting, ‘I give you the salute of freedom’. In his pocket were the poems of Catullus and a Byzantine coin. The coin was presented to Iris by Bulgarians after the war, along with Frank’s poem, ‘Beyond the Frontier’:

So we, whose life was all before us,

Our hearts with sunlight filled,

Left in the hills our books and flowers,

Descended, and were killed.

After his death, Iris came to feel that he had been her truest love. And ten years later she would fulfil that desire she had expressed to him, by writing her first novel. In some of the novels that followed, Frank is a recurrent figure, part warrior, part mystic. She was surely thinking of him when she wrote of the ‘inconceivably brave’ Irish dead of Easter 1916 in The Red and the Green (1965) who are ‘made young and perfect forever’.

Iris’s love life was sometimes the source of considerable pain for herself and others. In 1945, in a letter to a lover David Hicks, she gave a clear eyed account of the damage she had done when breaking off an affair with one man, Michael Foot, and taking up with another, Thomas Balogh, who was the lover of her best friend, the budding philosopher Philippa Bosanquet (later Foot). Iris confessed to Hicks that Balogh had been her first passionate love, and while in the throes of their affair, she had averted her eyes from Michael Foot’s sufferings. The whole episode caused great misery to her friends and left her ‘in a state of utter despair and self hatred’. It had brought to light her tendency to want love, yet not be fully engaged in response. She lent this tendency to the character Anna, in her first novel Under the Net  (1954):

To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidal of self surrender… This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty.

Iris wrote to Hicks that the dramatic ‘quadrilateral tale’ had the makings of a good psychological novel. Selfish love was to become a dominant theme in her novels, particularly in The Black Prince (1973) and The Sea, the Sea (1978) for which she won the Booker Prize.

A number of her affairs became deep, abiding friendships such as the one with the ‘brilliant and beautiful’ Philippa Bosanquet, later the moral philosopher who ended up marrying Michael Foot. Their frienship was strained after the ‘quadrilateral’ fiasco, but some fifteen years later, they both confessed to having desperatley missed their former intimacy. Iris would seek Philippa’s good opinion for the rest of her life and portrayed their friendship in The Nice and the Good. She wrote to her weekly, sometimes daily, sharing the doings of her life, the gossip, her insights, exhorting her to write back. When Philippa moved to the US for a time, Iris felt bereft: ‘I have a lot of special thoughts that can only be communicated to you’, she wrote.

Canetti and Evil

One of Iris Murdoch’s great loves was the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. In 1953 she embarked on a three year affair with him that was passionate, sadomasochistic and all consuming. Towards the end of her life, when Iris was in the grip of Alzheimer’s, she was still able to recall Canetti, whose name she said, ‘shudders me with happiness’.

It is midnight. [Canetti] was here for five hours. He fills me with wonder and delight and fear. I told him: you are a great city of which I am learning now the main thoroughfares, which roads lead to the river. Later I shall explore each quarter carefully.

A man who emanated great power, Canetti was ferocious, flirtatious, and by his own estimation a genius. He was also a serial liar, writing in 1954:

I have always to remember exactly what I have said to this person and to that, and, as I never give up on anyone, I am forced to continue this game with ingenuity and circumspection. It is as if I live in many novels at the same time, instead of writing them. The incompatibility of these fictions together, the tension between them I need. […] The risk of confrontation I love above anything in the world…

Canetti was cruel. He physically dominated Iris and she found his lust for power games disturbing, yet enthralling. He claimed to have introduced her to an understanding of evil, which became a prominent theme in her works, especially her Gothic novels: The Unicorn (1963),  The Bell (1958) and The Time of the Angels (1966)

Canetti cannot take all the credit for this interest. News about the Holocaust other atrocities had slowly emerged after the war. It posed real questions to philosophers at the time about how ethics could deal with the magnitude of what had occurred and gave critical impetus to a new moral philosophy. Iris and her brilliant philosopher friends from Oxford: Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley reintegrated ethics into philosophy at a time when it was out of fashion. They argued that there are moral truths, that we can and should make ourselves morally better. They felt it necessary to grapple with good and evil, and that courage, justice, love and discernment are at the heart of a good life.

In her essay ‘Against Dryness’, first published in Encounter in 1961, Iris wrote: ‘It is curious that modern literature, which is so much concerned with violence, contains so few convincing pictures of evil’. As a writer and philosopher who became preoccupied with Platonic good, the representation of evil in her fiction posed a particular challenge. Iris came to see evil as not just the absence of good, but a powerful, sometimes seductive force to be recognised within ourselves and others; a sign of our human frailty.

Conradi believes Canetti’s influence strengthened her work. His presence seeps into several of her novels as an evil enchanter figure in A Severed Head (1961), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Unicorn and The Sea The Sea, an ‘alien god’ who exercises spiritual or erotic power and transforms all situations into which he enters.

Marriage

Iris’s affair with Canetti was in full swing when she met John Bayley at a party in January 1954. He was then a brilliant young tutor at Oxford. She was immediately attracted to his gentleness, laughter and a sense of ‘joyous carnival’. Before they met, Bayley had seen her on a damp, drizzly day, ‘a wonderful and solitary being cycling laboriously past the window’ of his Oxford college, St Anthony’s, ‘looking both absent and displeased’. He said he suspected he had fallen most deeply in love with her then. Iris became his sun and he fell into her orbit for the rest of his life.

Bayley was well aware of his status as rival to Elias Canetti, a man he came to regard as ‘Pluto, god of the Underworld, with a crocodile smile, wanting to whisk Iris off to Hades’.  Iris prevaricated over marrying Bayley but what helped her to decide was a visit to the writer Elizabeth Bowen at her home in Ireland. There she witnessed the happy but celibate marriage which had given Bowen a safe harbour, and the freedom to have a range of affairs with both men and women. Iris was 37 to Bayley’s 31 when the couple wed at the Oxford Registry office in August 1956. Their union proved strong and lasting. Bayley accommodated Iris’s self-described ‘endless capacity for new loves’, although at least two of her affairs sorely tested him.

For Iris, marriage brought security and contentment and changed her profoundly. The preceding chaotic period in her life served as a quarry from which she could draw for the rest of her life and she was able to transform her earlier selves into fictional characters. She had chosen a man who gave her stability, did not want children, and did not expect her to look after him in any conventionally domestic sense (keeping in mind they married in the fifties). She wrote to a friend in 1958 that she was

now very happy in a world which has the simplicity which I never managed to achieve before…When I got married I was determined to stop being unhappy, and on the whole with John’s help I’ve succeeded very well.

This did not put a stop to her obsessive desire for others and she continued to have many intense and passionate affairs with men and women. She used the myth of the shape changing sea god Proteus to assuage Bayley’s ‘storms of fears and emotions’ and the chameleon-like role she played in them. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley wrote:

It was in reply to my despairing comment that I couldn’t understand her, or the different person she became for the many others with whom she seemed, in my view, helplessly entangled. ‘Remember Proteus’, she used to say. ‘Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right. Proteus had the power of changing himself into any shape he wished – lion, serpent, monster, fish – but when Hercules held tightly on to him through all these transformations he was compelled in the end to surrender, and to resume his proper shape as the man he was.

Bayley came to see that her liaisons were the ‘alembic’ from which her novels were distilled. They represented Iris’s ‘search for wisdom, authority and belief’ and ‘beneficence’ in her lovers, not least Elias Canetti, whom Iris continued to see a year into her marriage. Bayley said these affairs offered Iris the ‘hurly-burly of the chaise longue’ in contrast to the ‘deep, deep peace of the double bed.’

Conradi believed that for Iris,

…loving others was her way both of knowing them, and of losing herself. And loving her world was her way of realising or imagining it. As for the willingness to allow oneself to feel touched, it led naturally to the desire, in turn, to touch.

Love and the Notion of Attention

A famous quote from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell states that love is ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Iris believed the main barrier to love’s fulfilment is our ‘fat relentless ego’ that broods on selfish desires and concerns, preventing us from fully seeing another. She borrowed a term from Buddhism, ‘unselfing’, to describe the act of turning one’s attention outward, away from the self, towards the world.

Attention (borrowing the term from Simone Weil) depends on sincerely acknowledging the differences of others, regarding them with a just and loving gaze. Ideally this attention is not a single act but a way of being. It involves ongoing acts, ‘little peering efforts of imagination which have such important cumulative results.’ Iris believed that such loving attention, consistently bestowed on others, changes the self. She thought further that seeing how things are, not how we want them to be, is an act of both love and moral importance. If one can learn to properly attend, then unselfing can occur in the most unlikely places. In her book of moral philosophy The Sovereignty of Good, she gives an example of being taken outside of herself and brought face to face with something else in the world which is greater.

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

An echo of Iris’s experience can be found in a scene from A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Morgan, an emotionally needy woman, experiences what she believes to be a divine moment in nature that brings about a shift in her understanding about love. It occurs after she has spent some time in a beautiful part of the country, between tall banks tangled with wildflowers. She begins to see the flowers in detail, as if for the first time:

People with a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Her sustained attention leads to an ecstatic, almost out of body experience, ‘as if she had passed through a screen into a more primitive and lovely world’. She emerges from this episode feeling released from her life that had felt shut in and nightmarish. She realises that ‘Happiness is free innocent love. It’s so different from everything else that I’ve been up to almost all my life.’ Later she tells a friend of her discovery, that

It is possible to love people…I mean really, securely, in innocence. Falling in love is something different, it’s a form of madness. I think I just didn’t realise that at this moment in time I was really capable of noticing other people at all or that I could come to care for people in a new way, in an unselfish unfrantic sort of way.

A new attentiveness in Morgan has led her to a place of greater clarity, and she is able to separate love from obsession. But such sudden enlightenment is rare in Murdoch’s world. As A.S. Byatt points out, Murdoch shows in the novels how moral decisions are made, not blindly and impulsively, but as the result of a lifetime of attention or inattention. This refines our moral vision so that when a new situation arises, our moral vision guides us to the right choices.

Iris wrote about love in all its variety, exploring its relationship to power as much as to higher feelings. She was ahead of her time in believing there are no boundaries between different kinds of love, and that sexuality, like gender, is fluid. She wrote boldly and sympathetically about homosexuality long before it was decriminalised in Britain. The novelist and poet Garth Greenwell has written that the marriage in A Fairly Honourable Defeat between Simon and Axel, ‘remains, fifty years later, perhaps the most beautiful literary representation of a same-sex marriage I know.’ And Iris is brilliant at exploring the strange things that happen when we fall in love: how it can stretch the gamut of experience and render us so deluded, vulnerable and absurd on one hand, or expansive, wise and eloquent on the other. Her accounts feel so real because as we now know, they were based on first hand knowledge. In 1968, while looking back on her old diaries dating from 1945 she noted what an ‘ass’ she had been and wrote:

That business of falling in love with A, then with B, then with C (all madly) seems a bit sickening…I mustn’t live in this torment of emotion (Empty words – I shall always live so.)

London

Iris Murdoch adored London and knew its streets and landmarks as well as any cabbie. Of her twenty six novels, the city is strongly featured in eighteen of them; not since Dickens and Woolf has it been brought so vividly to life in fiction. Her characters are inseparable from their settings: the streets, houses, parks and pubs of London. There are precise details about neighbourhoods, from the genteel to the shabby. She carefully researched the locations for her settings, often borrowing friends with cars in the process.

Iris grew up in Chiswick and after graduating from Oxford University she returned to London, where she took a job with the Treasury. She rented a tiny flat very close to Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park that was so decrepit a friend said it resembled a stage-set in Dostoevsky. It constantly rumbled and shook from the District and Circle Line trains that passed directly underneath it and when the bombing became too bad, she sheltered in the bathtub under the stairs. One autumn morning, following a night of fire-watching, she walked with her friend Mary Midgley to Leicester Square. When they arrived, Mary said that Iris threw back her shoulders, breathed in ‘a deep gallon of air’, and announced, ‘The heart of London! The smell of London!’

As Big Ben was chiming ten o’clock Rupert Foster entered his room in Whitehall. Give or take a minute or two, this was his invariable time of arrival. The big square window showed him St James’s Park, feathery with high summer, the curving lake pale blue enamel under a clear sky, and the Palace as hazy and tree-blurred as any gentleman’s residence in the deepest country. Rupert sighed with satisfaction.

– A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Feeling the loss of her joyful friends from Oxford, Iris embarked on some famous pub crawls around Soho and Fitzrovia in ‘search of the Ultimate Human Beings – and knowledge and experience and freedom.’ She danced with Dylan Thomas at the Gargoyle, met the wild Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand at the Wheatsheaf and was propositioned by Arthur Koestler at a party. She wrote to Frank Thompson that the literary, bohemian crowd she discovered were

composed of restless incomplete ambitious people who live in a chaotic and random way, never caring about the next five minutes, drunk every night without exception from six o’clock onwards, homeless and unfamilied, living in pubs and copulating upon the floor of other people’s flats. Poetry is perhaps the only thing taken seriously by them all…

She preferred their company to the ‘smiling Treasury people who drink, but never too much, and who never in any sense give themselves away.’

On her walks around London, Iris took notes on the characters she met in the pubs, the atmosphere in the art galleries, and snatches of conversation overheard on the tube. She laid down some of her observations from this time in her first novel Under the Net which she described as a ‘philosophical adventure story’. It follows in episodic form the boozy mishaps of Jake Donaghue, an aspiring writer and bohemian bumming around London. Jake undergoes a moral journey through London’s labyrinthine streets and alleys while continuously traversing the city from the Thames Embankment to Knightsbridge via Hyde Park, the Holborn Viaduct to Earl’s Court Road, Chelsea Bridge to Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia. The twists and turns of the city’s streets act as a metaphorical foil for Jake’s internal struggles as he slowly sheds his egocentrism, and moves towards greater selflessness and goodness.

After Iris married John Bayley and they settled in Oxford, they kept a series of flats in the city. Iris associated her visits there with a ‘holiday feeling’ and came down at least one day a week. While Bayley, who did not share her affection for the city, was happily ensconced back home, she became the ‘terrific London gadabout’. Here she conducted her affairs, moving about freely, ‘feeling ordinary & buying cigarettes & feeling a whole city, as it were, backing up one’s incognito’.

In his book IRIS A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) Bayley states he was well aware that Iris had an active sex life in London with

unknown and godlike older men, whom she went humbly to ‘see’ at times when it suited them. Here, I began dimly to perceive, was where her creative imagination lay, and it was to feed it – almost, it seemed, to propitiate it – that she would make what appeared to me to be these masochistic journeys to London; and chiefly to Hampstead, for me the abode and headquarters of the evil gods.

Often she came home to Bayley with an amusing anecdote. Once on the train home from Paddington, she had sat opposite a young man reading one of her novels and was pleased to see it kept him absorbed all the way to Oxford. When they got off, he said to her: ‘You know, say what you like about that woman, and the critics don’t think much of her, but she can tell a story.’

Murdoch’s adventures in love brought her close to scandal. She was obliged to resign her post at the Oxford women’s St Annes college because of a gossip-provoking affair with a female colleague.  In 1963, when London was just beginning to swing, she took a job as lecturer in philosophy at the Royal College of Art. Iris was both ‘shocked, fascinated, delighted and appalled’ by the anarchy and loose morals of her students. Freshly liberated from the analytical thinking of Oxford (she had hated having to teach philosophy in discrete little units), now she could delve into subjects that fired her imagination such as love, art, The Good, God. All this fed into her novels: A Severed Head, The Time of the Angels, The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969).

In 1967 the Bayleys returned to Oxford but in 1972 Iris was thrilled when they bought a top floor flat in South Kensington, at 29 Cornwall Gardens. It was modest, shaded by plane trees at the front, and with a view of the Albert Memorial from the back. Bayley remembered they had a favourite bench near the memorial and they often walked from there to Kensington Gardens, admiring the handsome Williamite facade of the palace.

The park was in meadowy early summer glory, with long plumes of uncut grass making a luscious light yellowy green between splashed shadows. The air was thick with soft pollen smells which made breathing a luxury. Trees hazed the Albert memorial and smudged the rosy front of Kensington Palace and long golden vistas showed multi-coloured strollers with their dogs.

– An Accidental Man

The Thames, that mighty river that majestically cuts the city in half, is a strong presence in the novels. Murdoch’s characters walk beside it, cross it, swim or drown in it; one even loses his beloved stamp collection to it. She endows it with the power to wreak havoc, or to cleanse and redeem.

Eugene and Pattie came round a corner past a little public house and out of the shadow of the street on to a quay where the curve of the huge river lay before them, full to the brim and moving fast, a steely bluey grey covered in scaly golden flecks, and beyond it the skyline again of towers, and domes and spires, all pale and clear against a sky of light blue, like a blue stone polished until it glittered.

-The Time of the Angels

The business of living and finding meaning in a godless world was a theme that preoccupied Iris. She believed that in a secular world, nature and art could be portals to the sacred. Many of her characters use the galleries of London as sources of spiritual nourishment, as did she herself.

In The Bell the character Dora, an unhappily married wife who is adrift in life, visits the National Gallery as she had done on countless other occasions, feeling that the paintings were ‘almost as familiar to her as her own face.’ Revisiting her favourites, she finally stops in front of the painting by Gainsborough of his two daughters, ‘The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly’. The paintings had always moved her but now they do so in a new way:

…the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.

This attending to ‘something real outside herself’ is an act of unselfing. The web of subjective fantasy that had obscured Dora’s vision of her relationships and herself, vanishes before the authority of this outside reality. She realises the need to break her attachments that had been based on false illusions and her own ego: she needs to change her life.

It was to the National Gallery that Bayley took Iris in a bid to dislodge her first experience of writer’s block; but this in fact was the beginning of the Alzheimer’s that would claim her life.

The new material about Iris Murdoch’s unconventional life was unsettling to her many fans. It challenged the earlier image of her as a saintly, puritanical person. Alongside that familiar figure came a fuller picture. As the critic Bran Nicol writes, she was now ‘a complex, sexualised being, capable of cruelty and deception as much as kindness and wit.’ She was also inscrutable. After writing his memoir about his friend, A.N. Wilson confessed that despite his best efforts, what went on ‘behind that face’ had remained a mystery to him. But sometimes (not always) Alzheimer’s can uncover a truth. Conradi and Bayley believe that this was the case for Iris. As the illness advanced, enveloping her in exhausted confusion, crumbling her words and her reason, what came into view were her foundations: her gentle and infallible impulse toward love. The last letters to her friends are fragmented and half finished, yet they are full of her usual gratitude, affection and curiosity. And when Alzheimer’s had her teetering on the edge of oblivion and almost mute, she still had three words left: ‘I love you’.

Music

‘Sexy Sadie’ The Beatles

Living in London during most of the swinging sixties, Iris could not have escaped the music of the Beatles if she’d tried. She loved them, knew all their songs by heart and wrote that they should be made Poets Laureate. She was devastated when John Lennon was assassinated. In a letter to her lover Brigid Brophy she mentioned she’d been to a Rolling Stones concert and said ‘their appearance was sufficiently androgynous to please even me’.

Connection

The centenary of Iris Murdoch’s birth was widely celebrated in Britain in 2019 and a number of writers were asked to talk about what her novels had meant to them. Margaret Drabble said:

They filled me with joy. They have an exuberance, a playfulness, an inventiveness that I still find exhilarating […]. I loved the psychological drama, the complex sexuality, the turns and twists of the plot, the worldliness, the intensity […]. There is a magic about Murdoch’s observations that lights up the mundane world.

Patrick Gale said Iris Murdoch was very good at testifying to gay experience. She put it all on the same level as heterosexual experience which was rare at the time.The Bell was a particularly important novel to him when he read it as a young gay man as:

It acknowledged the validity of love between men without fanfare but simply as part of its compassionate survey of an array of human behaviours and misbehaviours.