Of her twenty novels, Iris Murdoch has written six in the first person, each one using a male narrator…. [One] cannot help wondering if her continual use of a male narrator amounts to another woman writer's surrendering her pen to the authority of the male novelist.

As far as Murdoch herself is concerned this would seem to be the case. While she has declared that she does not find "much difference between men and women," she also claims a male viewpoint for much the same reason that Marian Evans chose a male pseudonym:

I think perhaps I identify with men more than with women, because the ordinary human condition still seems to belong more to a man than to a woman.

                                           (p. 222)

Murdoch's preference "to be male" is in many ways central to her art. Her choice of male narrators allows for a playful act of male impersonation...