Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

At the time of her death on 8 February 1999 from complications associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, many of her novels were out of print. In the following two years, books about Iris, written by John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband of forty years, swamped the bookshops. Suddenly, Murdoch was being introduced to a large contemporary audience, not as a remarkable writer and moral philosopher but as a once-great woman struck down by Alzheimer’s. The voice of the novelist and philosopher was fading fast, and Peter Conradi’s biography (Iris Murdoch: A Life, 2001) did not help. Conradi provides a vivid evocation of the young Iris – her passion, her seductive splash, her brilliant intelligence, her joie de vivre – but his portrayal runs out of steam following Murdoch’s marriage in the mid-1950s.*