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The works of the novelist and philosopher Jean Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) portray characters whose warped and often dreamlike perceptions of reality create suffering among those whose lives they attempt to dominate. Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ir...

One of the prominent writers of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch has published twenty-six novels, five philosophical books, five plays, a book of poetry, and most recently two edited volumes of previously uncollected work--another book of poetry...

One of the dominant figures of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch continues to divide the critics; for example, one of the professors of English at Cambridge University, Frank Kermode, thinks highly of her work, while another, Christopher Ricks, ha...

Magic and the supernatural run, two lurid threads, throughout a loosely woven book [The Sea, The Sea]. Miss Murdoch has always presented love as though it were some kind of spell unaccountable in its mysterious waxing and waning…. Her people are infected with love or infect others in the same way that colds are caught and given…. By one of those coincidences more common in novels than real life, Charles finds that living in the same village is the girl, Hartley, whom he loved in his adolescenc...

The Sea, The Sea is clearly one of [Miss Murdoch's] 'mature' books—one of her longest, her richest, her most carefully paced. Love, again, is the kingdom in which everything occurs; it is past love projected and repeated in a mysterious and thoughtful present. This is one of her more magical novels, set in an economical landscape and seascape: somewhere in the north, in and around a gaunt Edwardian house, with a view across the sea, that 'image of an inaccessible freedom&#...

Like most of Iris Murdoch's novels, [The Sea, The Sea] is a thriller and whodunit on two levels: factual and philosophical. It is not too difficult to do an exegesis of the philosophical content because she leaves so many clues around, not to speak of overt explanations in dialogues and interior monologues. But that does not make it any less exciting. It is action-packed, and the action is handled with her usual virtuosity: there seems to be nothing she cannot get her words round, and she treats the ...