Why Read Iris Murdoch?
Miles Leeson reflects on the value of Iris Murdoch
Where does Iris Murdoch sit for readers today? In her lifetime she was nominated for the Booker Prize four times, winning for her most well-known novel The Sea, The Sea, along with numerous other awards, and a Damehood in 1987. Her work fell out of favour somewhat in the late 1980s and early 1990s but, since her death in 1999, there has been a growing appreciation of her twenty-six novels. However, fiction writing was not her only skill. Until the late 1960s she practiced as a professional philosopher, teaching at Oxford University, and then the Royal College of Art in London; she wrote major works of philosophy that are only now becoming widely appreciated. She also wrote poetry, plays, essays, reviews, and thousands of letters, often spending up to four hours a day writing to people all over the world.
In some respects, Iris Murdoch remains professionally unfashionable. It is many years since her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, was on an A-Level syllabus and few Universities teach her fiction in the UK. Although her novels still sell fairly well, she has not ‘caught fire’ like Virginia Woolf or Angela Carter, or living authors such as Margaret Atwood or Jeanette Winterson: why is this? Well, she is often considered to be too ‘difficult’, ‘dry and academic’, or just ‘out of touch with modern life’. Yet her work deals sensitively with a range of issues that only a great novelist can accomplish. She discussed homosexuality compassionately before it was decriminalised in England; intense erotic relationships, incest, abortion, sado-masochism, dominance and power – all are present in her novels. She was unusual in her time in recognising the fluidity of gender, writing to her friend in 1967 that ‘I think I am sexually rather odd, which is male homosexual in female guise’ (Living on Paper, 347). Since her death biographies, collections of letters and interviews, and the discovery of her personal journals, have added to our understanding of this complex writer who demanded tolerance and acceptance of the full range of human experience.
Her work itself is rather difficult to categorise. She has been referred to as a moral realist, a magical realist, a surrealist, a moral psychologist, and a philosophical novelist. None of these captures the entirety of her fiction: how could they, given a forty-year writing career, from 1954 to 1995? Murdoch believed that fiction should be of paramount importance as it is a place where the reader can be transported, changed, made new. In one of her essays she wrote: ‘For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race, art is doubtless more important than philosophy, and literature most important of all’ (Existentialists and Mystics, 371). Murdoch believed that through literature a reader could be exposed to the reality of others, and of the world.
One novel that exemplifies her belief in the role of literature is her fourth, The Bell (1958). It revolves around a young woman, Dora, who is about to join her husband at a semi-religious community that is attached to an Abbey. Murdoch is very good, much like Jane Austen, at opening lines: ‘Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason’ (1), drawing you in to the action as Dora boards a train. Although it is primarily set in a quasi-religious community, the heavy irony is that, aside from those who live within the cloistered walls of the Abbey, everyone else is fallible, damaged, or unhinged: ‘Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed’ (75) the Abbess tells Dora.
This concern with escape, from shirking one’s responsibilities in the ‘real’ world for a life of fantasy, is one of the common themes that runs throughout all of Murdoch’s fiction. This can take the form of a (usually doomed) love affair, moving to a remote location, or changing one’s lifestyle. Time and again in her fiction she highlights that an individual must try to reduce their ‘fat, relentless ego’ (Existentialists and Mystics, 342) in order to progress: she referred to this as ‘unselfing’. It is no use consoling oneself with daydreams. In The Bell a key moment of unselfing for Dora is when she comes to realise that there is a world outside of her own as she stands in front of Gainsborough’s ‘The Painter’s Daughters catching a Butterfly’ in the National Gallery in London.
Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect…Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making part of her fantasy make it worthless…the pictures were something real outside herself…something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. (196)
Works of art are, for Murdoch, key to transcending the ego, of moving away from the self towards the ‘other’. She uses them as secular icons (an object worth of worship or veneration) to highlight the necessity of moving from concern with the self to attention to another being. Throughout her life she believed that works of art, and novels in particular, could (and indeed should) occasion moral improvement in the reader. As she says in her novel The Black Prince, ‘All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous’ (181). This is not to say that she was heavy-handed or dogmatic in the way she approached her fiction; she certainly rejected any notion of espousing a particular set of views into her work. Her work is filled with both comedy and poignancy, inspired by her great love for Shakespeare. You don’t need to come to her novels with a wide knowledge of any of the subjects mentioned here. She believed, as an atheist, that if there was to be any salvation for mankind it would not come through a divine power, but through the power of art – particularly though seeing the world as it really is.
To read Murdoch now is to realise how much our concerns today derive from thinkers of the mid-twentieth century. Authors to acknowledge her influence include Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, and A.S. Byatt. She speaks to our contemporary concerns and allows her readers to discover, or rediscover, themselves through her focus on what it means to be good. Ultimately, her message is one of hope and love: ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality’ (Existentialists and Mystics, 215). Reading Murdoch for the first time elicits the same feeling: of being exposed to the real concerns of humanity, and how we might respond to them through loving attention.
Miles Leeson, Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester
• Miles will lecture on Murdoch’s fascinating novel of 1958, The Bell, on Sunday 26 September 2021, 6.00 pm.
Key Works
Under the Net, 1954
The Bell, 1958
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 1970
The Black Prince, 1973
The Sea, The Sea, 1978
The Philosopher’s Pupil, 1983
Existentialists and Mystics, 1997
Key Secondary Works
Conradi, P. J. Iris Murdoch: A Life, 2001
Horner, A. and Rowe, A. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, 2015
Leeson, M. Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, 2019
Rowe, A. Iris Murdoch, 2019
