Books Written by Iris Murdoch

She published 26 novels between 1954 and 1995, all with Chatto & Windus, alongside six works of moral philosophy, two published plays, and a collection of poems. Her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma, appeared in 1995, four years before her death in 1999.

Under the Net (1954), her debut, is the usual recommendation for its comic energy and relative accessibility. Readers who want the novel most representative of her mature style generally start with The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978. The Booker Prize's own guide to her work names a third option, The Black Prince (1973), as the one to read if you only read one.

The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. It follows Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director who retreats to a coastal house and becomes obsessed with the woman he loved as a teenager, treating that obsession as a case study in self-deception.

Seven of her 26 novels were nominated. She was shortlisted for The Nice and the Good (1969, the first year the prize was awarded), Bruno's Dream (1970), The Black Prince (1973), The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987); she won in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea; and A Fairly Honourable Defeat was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, the retrospective award created in 2010 for the novels of 1970.

Any order. None of the 26 novels is a sequel and no characters recur, so nothing is spoiled by jumping around. Publication order is only useful if you want to watch the style change — shorter and more comic early on, densest and strongest between 1968 and 1985, longer and looser at the end.

Yes, and philosophy first. She taught at St Anne's College, Oxford, and her first published book was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), the first study of Sartre in English. She went on to publish The Sovereignty of Good (1970), The Fire and the Sun (1977), Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and the essay collection Existentialists and Mystics (1997).

It collects three essays arguing that morality is primarily a matter of attention rather than choice — that the real work is learning to see other people accurately, because the ego constantly distorts the view, and that by the time you reach the moment of decision the seeing has already determined what you will do. It is her most cited philosophical work and the argument underneath every one of her novels.

They return consistently to how people deceive themselves about their own motives, particularly in obsessive love, and to what it would take to see another person clearly rather than as a projection of one's own needs. Most take place among tightly connected circles of English intellectuals, artists and academics whose sophistication does nothing to protect them.

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was an Irish-born British novelist and philosopher. Born in Dublin on 15 July 1919 and raised in London, she taught philosophy at Oxford before becoming one of the most prolific novelists of her generation, publishing 26 novels between 1954 and 1995 alongside six works of moral philosophy. She won the Booker Prize in 1978 and was made a Dame in 1987.

She died on 8 February 1999 in Oxford, aged 79. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997, and the illness was already affecting her writing while she worked on her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma (1995). Her husband John Bayley wrote about those years in his memoir Elegy for Iris, which was filmed as Iris in 2001 with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.

Because Murdoch wrote by hand and revised very little, the manuscript of her final novel offers an unusually clean record of unedited prose written during the onset of Alzheimer's. A 2004 study at University College London compared it with her earlier work and found the vocabulary measurably narrower and the syntax simpler, which is why the novel is now cited in research on detecting the disease through language.

A Severed Head (1961) follows Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a wine merchant whose orderly life collapses after his wife announces she is leaving him for her psychoanalyst, setting off a farcical chain of infidelity and self-justification among a small circle of friends and family. It is her funniest novel, and she adapted it for the stage with J. B. Priestley.

The Black Prince (1973) is narrated by Bradley Pearson, a blocked and self-important novelist who falls obsessively in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of a more successful friend. Six other characters dispute his version of events in postscripts, so the reader is left to decide who is lying. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker.

The Italian Girl (1964), at roughly 160 pages, is the shortest and the usual recommendation for readers who want to try her without committing to a 500-page novel. A Severed Head (1961) and The Bell (1958) are also on the shorter side.

Because she fused serious moral philosophy with genuinely readable, often very funny fiction, using 26 novels to dramatise one question: whether people are capable of seeing anyone, including themselves, clearly, or whether the ego always distorts the view. Few novelists have sustained a single philosophical argument across so many books without the fiction ever collapsing into an illustration of a thesis.