Helen Rees Leahy writes about our 2026 Iris Murdoch course, live online with Dr Miles Leeson
Iris Murdoch and the Natural World, March–May 2026
Miles Leeson’s annual course on the novels of Iris Murdoch has become a regular and justifiably popular fixture on the Literature Cambridge programme. Each year, Miles chooses a theme that recurs in Murdoch’s imaginary world and five novels through which to explore that motif. The course format combines structure and flexibility: each fortnight, an online lecture and seminar explore a single work, accompanied by notes and references. The lectures are recorded and made available for participants after the live session. It is a format that has been well honed by Literature Cambridge: their skill in combining intellectual and online connection emerges from deep a knowledge and love of books and ideas, delivered with friendly professionalism.
This year’s theme was ‘Iris Murdoch and the Natural World’ and the five novels chosen by Miles were: The Unicorn (1963), The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Message to the Planet (1989). In each of these novels, Murdoch conjures landscapes that might be rocky, watery, boggy, wooded, or grassy, not as a backdrop to the action, but as a constitutive force in the drama of human life. Animals are also part of this world: indifferent to and immune from human folly, yet capable of arousing strong, and often unexpected, feelings in us. Murdoch shows that how we relate to the otherness of nature can be terrifying, exhilarating or consoling, but it is always revelatory.
An interesting aspect of this year’s group of novels is that, except for The Unicorn, they were among the last eight that Murdoch published. Thinking about these late works spanning a decade (from The Sea, The Sea in 1978 to The Message to the Planet in 1989) underlined the significance of human/non-human relationships in her thinking at this time. From this perspective, The Unicorn could be read as a foretaste of her repeated exploration of the agency of the non-human world – her version of animism - in the late 1970s and 80s. As Lucy Oulton argues in Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination, in these later novels, ‘…episodes are no longer seen to be exclusively triggered or bounded by characters but may equally be instigated by the enchantment of structure or landscape.’ And as with Murdoch’s (ostensibly) human enchanters, her rocks, rivers, marshes and mountains exist somewhere between reality, metaphor and myth.
As readers, we follow the author into these seductive, unsettling and sometimes dangerous places, drawn in by the power of her description and by our sense that there is more to Murdoch’s natural world than meets the eye. At times, looking itself becomes impossible: for example, when the effect of light on the Alpilles rocks in Nuns and Soldiers dissolves their solidity, so that they seem to ‘jump and shift’ and resist steady vision. By contrast, there is invariably an ethical dimension to Murdoch’s own close observation of the natural world: sometimes through her assertion of moral qualities in non-human actors (virtuous dogs and kindly stones); sometimes as result of transformative experiences in unknowable and unpredictable environments; and sometimes through our capacity to set aside ego and its preoccupations by directing our sustained attention to the natural world. Among the many references to Murdoch’s philosophy that Leeson discussed during the course, the famous passage about the kestrel in Existentialists and Mystics stuck with me:
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to 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 kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. (p. 369)
As well as interweaving Murdoch’s philosophical ideas into our understanding of her fiction, Miles Leeson sets each novel in the context of her professional, personal and social lives when she was writing it. In the final book on our short curriculum. The Message to the Planet, Murdoch probed the political and spiritual dimensions of eco-centrism, raising questions about her own politics and theological interests in the late 1980s. As ever, Miles was willing and able to engage in a discussion on any and every topic that the class raised. Inevitably, the course theme exceeds the five novels chosen each year, as Miles himself cheerfully admits; and one the pleasures of the course is the way that he connects the set texts with other works. Miles is often asked how he would ‘rate’ a particular novel within Murdoch’s oeuvre and which other novels he would recommend in relation to a certain topic or idea. You can almost hear the cogs whirring as he sifts through his deep knowledge of Murdoch to give a characteristically expansive answer. I suspect that everyone leaves each seminar with a personal list of further reading.
This was my second year as a participant, and I fully intend to come back for more (on Murdoch and Marriage – who can resist?) in 2027.
Iris Murdoch and Marriage will run live online, Sundays, fortnightly, 10 January to 7 March 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm UK time (GMT).
