Reading List

Authors Like Iris Murdoch

In 1978 Iris Murdoch won the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea, in which Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director, moves to a house on the coast to write his memoirs, finds his first love living in the village, and talks himself into believing she still wants him. It is the whole of Murdoch in one book: a narrator who cannot see past his own fantasy, a plot full of coincidence and comedy, and a question underneath about what it would take to see another person as she really is. Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, read Greats at Somerville College, Oxford, and taught philosophy at St Anne's from 1948 to 1963. Her first book was the first English-language study of Sartre (1953); her first novel, Under the Net, followed in 1954, and twenty-five more came before Jackson's Dilemma in 1995. Her philosophy, above all The Sovereignty of Good (1970), borrows Simone Weil's idea of “attention”: goodness as the patient work of seeing what is there instead of what the ego wants. She died in Oxford in 1999, two years after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. In 2026 two book bloggers are running “A Year with Iris Murdoch”, a novel a month starting with The Sea, the Sea. The writers below share her territory: novels that take moral life seriously, people who deceive themselves about love, and stories that let a philosophical question play out through character and plot rather than argument.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Philosophical fiction · Love and self-deception · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Iris Murdoch, go back first to the novelists she named herself: George Eliot, for Middlemarch's moral attention, and Dostoevsky, for ideas fought out by people in crisis. A.S. Byatt, her friend and first critic, is the closest English heir. Muriel Spark is her sharper, shorter contemporary, and Kazuo Ishiguro writes the self-deceiving narrator she perfected in The Sea, the Sea.

10 authors like Iris Murdoch

01
The Victorian root · Closest match

George Eliot

English · b. 1819 · Novelist

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, who translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity into English before she wrote any fiction. Middlemarch follows a provincial town through the marriages and ambitions of Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate and the people around them. In a 1990 Paris Review interview Murdoch named Eliot among the English novelists whose work she held up as truthful.

The source of Murdoch's central subject. Middlemarch turns on characters who mistake their own needs for the truth about someone else — Dorothea about Casaubon, Lydgate about Rosamond — and on the slow, painful moment of seeing clearly. Eliot explains more and Murdoch dramatises more, but the moral attention is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Eliot →

02
Ideas lived to the end

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · b. 1821 · Novelist

Dostoevsky was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a socialist reading circle, reprieved at the last moment, and served four years in a Siberian prison camp. His great novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov — put faith, freedom and guilt into the mouths of characters at breaking point. Murdoch called him, with Dickens and Tolstoy, one of the “wise moralistic writers who portray the complexity of morality and the difficulty of being good”.

Murdoch's crowded, feverish set pieces — the late-night confrontations, the charismatic man everyone orbits, the sudden violence — owe more to Dostoevsky than to any English novelist. Both let philosophy happen as melodrama, and both take the possibility of real goodness seriously without making it easy.

— Lisanne

Every book by Fyodor Dostoevsky →

03
The novelist she loved

Henry James

American-British · b. 1843 · Novelist

Born in New York, James settled in London in 1876 and became a British subject in 1915, the year before he died. His novels set Americans against European society and are built on what characters notice, misread and hide from each other. Asked in 1990 for examples of truthful art, Murdoch ran through the English novel and ended with “of course, Henry James, whom I love”.

James is the master of the scene in which one person slowly realises what another has been doing all along, which is the turning point of half of Murdoch's novels. His sentences are slower and his world is more polite, but The Golden Bowl — a marriage, an adultery, four people watching each other — is the book of his most like hers.

— Lisanne

Every book by Henry James →

04
The philosopher's novel, in Paris

Simone de Beauvoir

French · b. 1908 · Philosopher and novelist · Prix Goncourt 1954

Beauvoir is best known for The Second Sex (1949), but she wrote novels throughout her life. The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, follows a circle of left-wing Paris intellectuals from the end of the war into the mid-1950s; readers have long seen Sartre and Camus in its main characters, which Beauvoir denied. She Came to Stay is about a couple whose relationship is unsettled by a third person.

Murdoch's first book was about Sartre, and Beauvoir is the novelist of the same circle of ideas. Both write love triangles and intellectual friendships as moral tests, and The Mandarins, with its politics and its tangled affairs, is the nearest French equivalent to Murdoch's London novels. Beauvoir is more political and more autobiographical; Murdoch is funnier.

— Lisanne

Every book by Simone de Beauvoir →

05
Her sharpest contemporary

Muriel Spark

Scottish · b. 1918 · Novelist

Spark was born in Edinburgh, became a Catholic in 1954 and published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie follows a teacher and the “set” of girls she shapes at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for The Public Image and Loitering with Intent, and won the David Cohen Prize in 1997.

Spark and Murdoch began publishing within three years of each other, and both are fascinated by the charismatic figure who bends other people's lives to a private story — Jean Brodie is a Murdoch “enchanter” in a tweed skirt. Spark is quicker, colder and much shorter; read her when you want Murdoch's moral comedy in two hundred pages.

— Lisanne

Every book by Muriel Spark →

06
Friend, critic and heir

A.S. Byatt

English · b. 1936 · Novelist and critic · Booker 1990

Byatt's first book was Degrees of Freedom (1965), the first full-length study of Murdoch's novels; Murdoch was her friend and mentor. Possession, about two modern scholars uncovering a hidden love affair between two Victorian poets, won the Booker Prize in 1990, and Murdoch called it “wonderful” in her Paris Review interview the same year. The Children's Book was shortlisted for the Booker in 2009.

The writer who learned most directly from Murdoch: novels of ideas that are also love stories, crowded with artists, scholars and talk. Byatt is more interested in art and history and less in goodness, but her Frederica Potter quartet, beginning with The Virgin in the Garden (1978), is the closest thing to a continuation of Murdoch's world.

— Lisanne
07
Born the same year

Doris Lessing

British · b. 1919 · Novelist · Nobel 2007

Lessing was born in Persia in October 1919, three months after Murdoch, grew up in Southern Rhodesia and moved to London in 1949. The Golden Notebook, her most experimental novel, follows a writer, Anna Wulf, who splits her life across four notebooks. She won the Nobel Prize in 2007 as “that epicist of the female experience”.

Lessing and Murdoch were the two big British women novelists of ideas of the postwar decades, both former Communists, both determined that a novel could carry politics and philosophy. Lessing works through fragmentation and politics where Murdoch works through plot and love; The Golden Notebook is where to see the difference.

— Lisanne

Every book by Doris Lessing →

08
The quiet moral novel

Anita Brookner

English · b. 1928 · Novelist · Booker 1984

Brookner was an art historian of French painting, and the first woman to be Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, before she published her first novel, A Start in Life, at 53. Hotel du Lac, about a writer of romantic novels sent to a hotel on Lake Geneva after a scandal, won the Booker Prize in 1984. She wrote around two dozen novels about solitude, scruple and the gap between good people and successful ones.

Brookner takes Murdoch's question of how to be good and strips away the comedy and the crowd: one careful woman, one hotel, a choice between honesty and comfort. The books are short and quiet, and they reward the same reader who likes the moral seriousness under Murdoch's plots.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anita Brookner →

09
One misreading, a lifetime of consequences

Ian McEwan

English · b. 1948 · Novelist · Booker 1998

McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam and has been shortlisted four more times, including for Atonement. Atonement opens at a country house in 1935, where a thirteen-year-old girl misreads what she sees and makes an accusation that destroys two lives. In 2006 critics pointed to passages in it that echoed Lucilla Andrews's wartime memoir No Time for Romance; McEwan had acknowledged the book as a source and rejected the charge of plagiarism.

Atonement is the most Murdochian novel of its generation: a country house, a summer's day, a mind that turns what it sees into the story it wants, and a writer who makes fiction out of the damage. McEwan's prose is cooler and his plots tighter, but the subject — failing to see another person — is hers.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ian McEwan →

10
The self-deceiving narrator

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · b. 1954 · Novelist · Nobel 2017

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family when he was five. The Remains of the Day, about an English butler looking back on a life of service, won the Booker Prize in 1989, and he won the Nobel Prize in 2017 for novels that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. In 1990 Murdoch named his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, among the few recent books she had enjoyed.

If Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea or Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince were what you loved, Ishiguro's Stevens is their quiet cousin: a narrator who tells you everything except the truth about himself. Ishiguro is restrained where Murdoch is extravagant, but both make the reader see what the narrator cannot.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

Where to start if you loved Iris Murdoch

If you want The Sea, the Sea again, read Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Remains of the Day: another narrator who cannot see himself.

If you want the roots of her moral seriousness, read George Eliot.

Middlemarch, the novel behind half of hers.

If you want her world carried on, read A.S. Byatt.

Possession — the novel Murdoch called “wonderful”.

If you want her comedy in fewer pages, read Muriel Spark.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in an evening.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Iris Murdoch

Who should I read if I love Iris Murdoch?

Start with the novelists she admired: George Eliot, Dostoevsky and Henry James, whom she named in her 1990 Paris Review interview. Among her contemporaries, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir are the closest. A.S. Byatt, her friend and first critic, is her most direct heir, and Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan write the self-deceiving characters she made her subject.

What books are like The Sea, the Sea?

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) has the same kind of narrator, telling his own story and missing the point of it. Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) turns on the same failure to see another person clearly. Murdoch's own The Black Prince (1973), narrated by a writer obsessed with a much younger woman, is the closest of her other novels.

Where should I start with Iris Murdoch?

The Sea, the Sea (1978), her Booker winner, is the usual first book and the one “A Year with Iris Murdoch” opened with in January 2026. Under the Net (1954), her short, comic first novel, is the easiest way in, and The Bell (1958), set in a lay religious community, is the best of her early books.

Was Iris Murdoch a philosopher as well as a novelist?

Yes. She taught philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963, wrote the first English-language book on Sartre (1953), and published The Sovereignty of Good (1970), which argues, drawing on Simone Weil, that moral life is mainly a matter of attention: learning to see other people and the world as they are. Her novels dramatise the same idea rather than argue it.

Which novelists did Iris Murdoch admire?

In her 1990 Paris Review interview she named the English tradition from Jane Austen through Dickens, Emily Brontë and George Eliot, “and of course, Henry James, whom I love”, and called Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy “wise moralistic writers”. She said she read few contemporaries, but singled out Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills and A.S. Byatt's Possession.

Is the film Iris based on a true story?

Yes. Iris (2001), directed by Richard Eyre with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as the young and old Murdoch, is based on her husband John Bayley's memoir of their marriage and her Alzheimer's. For her life in full, read Peter J. Conradi's biography Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001); A.N. Wilson's Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (2003) is a more personal and much more critical portrait.

Footnotes

  1. Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117 — The Paris Review
  2. Iris Murdoch — Wikipedia
  3. Introducing A Year with Iris Murdoch — Reading Matters
  4. A. S. Byatt — Wikipedia
  5. The Mandarins — Wikipedia
  6. Doris Lessing — Nobel Prize in Literature 2007
  7. Kazuo Ishiguro — Nobel Prize in Literature 2017
  8. Obituary: Anita Brookner, novelist — The Scotsman

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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