Author Guide · Literary Fiction & Moral Philosophy
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Iris Murdoch published a study of Sartre before she published a novel. She taught philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963, and between Under the Net in 1954 and Jackson’s Dilemma in 1995 she wrote 26 novels, all published by Chatto & Windus. They are full of articulate, educated people who are wrong about their own motives: a theatre director who retires to the sea and decides his first love must be rescued from her marriage, a blocked novelist who tells his own story while the other characters wait to contradict him. The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978, and alongside the fiction she kept writing philosophy, above all The Sovereignty of Good (1970). This guide covers her 26 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 26 key novels · 1954–1995 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Iris Murdoch published 26 novels, from Under the Net (1954) to Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), alongside six works of moral philosophy. Her best-known books are The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize, The Black Prince (1973), The Bell (1958) and A Severed Head (1961). Start with Under the Net, her comic debut, or go straight to The Sea, The Sea for the novel she is remembered for. Below, each of the 26 novels comes with a short note on where it sits.
Where to Start with Iris Murdoch
If you have never read her
→ Under the Net (1954) — the comic debut, set in London and Paris.
If you want the one she is famous for
→ The Sea, The Sea (1978) — the 1978 Booker winner.
If you want the critics’ choice
→ The Black Prince (1973) — the Booker Prize’s own pick if you read only one.
If you are short on time
→ The Italian Girl (1964) — her shortest novel.
26 Iris Murdoch Novels, in Order
Under the Net
Jake Donaghue, a broke writer and translator in his early thirties, is thrown out of his London lodgings and goes looking for the philosopher Hugo Belfounder, whose conversations he once turned into a book without asking. The search takes him through a string of comic escapades, including the kidnapping of a film star’s dog, and a stretch in Paris. Time named it one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923, and it is on the Modern Library’s list of the century’s best novels in English.
Start here if you think philosophical novels are hard work. It’s a comedy about a man who cannot commit to anything, and it moves.
— LisanneThe Flight from the Enchanter
A circle of Londoners — Rosa Keepe and her brother Hunter, the schoolgirl Annette Cockeyne, the scholar Peter Saward — orbit Mischa Fox, a wealthy press magnate who may be foreign and is said to have almost mystical power over people. Her second novel, and her first long look at the kind of figure everyone else arranges themselves around.
The first time she writes the character she would spend her whole career on: the person everyone else arranges themselves around. Uneven, but you can watch her finding it.
— LisanneThe Sandcastle
Bill Mor, a middle-aged schoolmaster with ambitions to stand for Labour, falls in love with Rain Carter, a young painter hired to paint the school’s former headmaster. His wife Nan finds them out, and at the unveiling of the portrait she publicly backs his political career, leaving Rain to decide whether to stay.
The most conventional novel she wrote, and the one I’d skip if you are only reading a few. Fine, and never more than fine.
— LisanneThe Bell
Imber Court, a lay religious community in Gloucestershire, sits across a lake from an abbey of enclosed nuns whose medieval bell, legend says, flew into the water when a nun broke her vows. As a new bell is prepared for the abbey, Dora Greenfield, her husband Paul, the community’s leader Michael Meade and the eighteen-year-old Toby Gashe find their private crises surfacing together. It sold 30,000 copies in Britain within ten weeks and was adapted for BBC television in 1982.
A community of people trying very hard to be good, which is exactly where Murdoch finds the most damage. This is the one I’d hand to someone who reads literary fiction but has never touched her.
— LisanneA Severed Head
Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a wine merchant with a young lover on the side, is told by his wife Antonia that she is leaving him for her psychoanalyst, Palmer Anderson. Martin then falls for Palmer’s half-sister, the anthropologist Honor Klein, and the pairings keep reversing until almost nobody ends up where they started. She adapted it for the stage with J. B. Priestley in 1963, and it was filmed in 1970.
Genuinely funny, which nobody warns you about. Everyone sleeps with everyone and nobody will say plainly what they want.
— LisanneAn Unofficial Rose
After his wife’s funeral, the retired civil servant Hugh Peronett sells a valuable Tintoretto so that his son Randall, a rose-grower, can leave his wife Ann for Lindsay Rimmer — companion to the novelist Emma Sands, whom Hugh loved twenty-five years earlier. Hugh’s hope of winning Emma back drives a plot in which almost every character loves someone who cannot return it.
One man’s late crush rearranges four other lives and he barely notices. Middling Murdoch, but the ending is colder than you see coming.
— LisanneThe Unicorn
Marian Taylor arrives as a governess at Gaze Castle, on a remote stretch of the Irish coast, and finds no children: only Hannah Crean-Smith, kept on the estate for seven years by the husband she once tried to kill. Marian and a visiting admirer, Effingham Cooper, plan to rescue her, and the attempt goes badly wrong.
A gothic experiment that doesn’t quite come off, though I’d rather read her failing than most writers succeeding. Save it until you already like her.
— LisanneThe Italian Girl
Edmund Narraway, an engraver who lives alone, goes back to the family home in the north for his mother’s cremation and is pulled into his brother Otto’s collapsing marriage, his niece Flora’s pregnancy and the secrets of Maria Magistretti, the family’s long-serving nursemaid. The Booker Prize’s guide gives it as about 160 pages, and it is usually named as her shortest novel. James Saunders adapted it for the stage with her in 1967.
A hundred and sixty pages, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether she’s for you. Claustrophobic, and deliberately so.
— LisanneThe Red and the Green
Her only historical novel, set in Dublin in the week before the Easter Rising of 1916, among an Anglo-Irish family divided by religion and by loyalty to England or Ireland. Andrew Chase-White, a young officer on leave, his aunt Millie, who is storing rifles for the Volunteers in her cellar, and his Irish cousins are caught up in a romantic farce that ends as the Rising begins.
Her only historical novel, and the only time Ireland is the subject rather than the accent. Worth it for that alone, even if it isn’t her strongest.
— LisanneThe Time of the Angels
Carel Fisher, an Anglican priest who has lost his faith, is given a bombed London church of which only the tower and the fog-bound rectory are left standing. He performs no duties and shuts everyone out, including his brother Marcus, while the household’s secrets — about his daughter, his niece and the housekeeper Pattie — come apart over a few winter days.
The bleakest thing she wrote. A priest with no faith, a house with no light, and nothing arriving to fill either.
— LisanneThe Nice and the Good
When a civil servant shoots himself in his Whitehall office, the department’s legal adviser, John Ducane, is asked to investigate, and uncovers rumours of black magic and blackmail. A second plot plays out at a house by the sea in Dorset, where a crowd of friends and children pair off, quarrel and reconcile. It was shortlisted for the first Booker Prize, in 1969.
A death in Whitehall turns into an audit of everyone’s private dishonesty. The rare Murdoch that ends somewhere near happy.
— LisanneBruno’s Dream
Bruno, an old man, is dying in a London house. Around him the narration moves between his son Miles, Miles’s wife Diana, her sister Lisa and Bruno’s son-in-law Danby, who fall in and out of love with one another before most of them pair off. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.
An old man dying badly and thinking about spiders. Quieter and sadder than her usual, and it stayed with me longer than the famous ones.
— LisanneA Fairly Honourable Defeat
Julius King, a biochemist, bets his former lover Morgan that he can break up the couple Simon and Axel, and sets out to prove how easily good people can be made to betray one another; Morgan’s brother-in-law Rupert, who is writing a book on how to live morally, becomes his main victim. Morgan’s estranged husband Tallis, who absorbs harm instead of passing it on, is the novel’s counterweight. In 2010 it was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, created for novels published in 1970.
Julius King is the most frightening thing she ever invented, precisely because he’s bored rather than evil. If you read one novel from her middle period, this one.
— LisanneAn Accidental Man
Austin Gibson Grey, a hapless middle-aged man who blames everyone else for his bad luck, kills a child while driving drunk, and is helped by his brother Matthew to escape suspicion. The novel is built from 74 short sections, with long stretches told in unattributed party conversation and in letters between characters.
Told largely in overheard party talk and letters nobody answers. A technical showpiece, easier to admire than to love.
— LisanneThe Black Prince
Bradley Pearson, an ageing and blocked London writer, falls in love with Julian, the young daughter of his friend and more successful rival, Arnold Baffin, and tells the story himself, from prison. After his account, an editor’s foreword is answered by postscripts from four of the other characters, each disputing what he says happened. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1973; the Booker Prize’s own guide names it the one to read if you read only one.
Her best book, and the one where the narrator’s self-deception is the plot. Read the postscripts — that’s where it goes off.
— LisanneThe Sacred and Profane Love Machine
Blaise Gavender, an amateur psychotherapist, has a wife, Harriet, and a son at home, and a second household with his mistress Emily McHugh and her son Luca; his neighbour, the grieving thriller writer Montague Small, is drawn into the fallout when the arrangement comes apart. It won the Whitbread Prize for 1974.
A man running two households and two versions of himself until neither survives. The title states the argument, which is very Murdoch.
— LisanneA Word Child
Hilary Burde, an unloved child who found a way out through languages and an Oxford scholarship, wrecked his career when his affair with the wife of his colleague Gunnar ended in two deaths. Years later, working as a minor civil servant in London, he finds Gunnar back in his life with a second wife, and falls for her too.
A man living by strict timetable so the past cannot reach him, and then it does. The tightest plot she ever built.
— LisanneHenry and Cato
Henry Marshalson, an art historian living in America, comes home to inherit the family estate, Laxlinden Hall, and plans to sell it and give the money away. His childhood friend Cato Forbes, a Catholic priest losing his faith, is in love with Beautiful Joe, a seventeen-year-old who claims to be a petty criminal, and leaves the priesthood for him, with violent results.
Two men losing what they believed in, side by side. Underrated, and the priest’s story is braver than it gets credit for.
— LisanneThe Sea, The Sea
Charles Arrowby, a vain theatre director, retires to a house by the sea to write his memoirs and discovers that Hartley, his first love from adolescence, now elderly and married, lives in the village. He decides she must be rescued from her marriage, and the novel becomes a study of obsession and self-deception told by a man sure of his own good intentions. It won the Booker Prize in 1978 and was adapted for BBC radio in 1993 and, with Jeremy Irons, in 2015.
The famous one, and it earns it: five hundred pages of a man being confidently wrong about himself. Start here if you want her at full strength.
— LisanneNuns and Soldiers
Guy Openshaw dies of cancer in his London flat, leaving his wife Gertrude among the friends who depended on him. Gertrude hires Tim Reede, a struggling painter, to look after her house in France, and they fall in love; her closest friend, Anne Cavidge, has just left the convent after years as a nun.
Grief, then desire, then guilt about the desire. Slower than her best, but the widow is one of her most convincing women.
— LisanneThe Philosopher’s Pupil
The famous philosopher John Robert Rozanov returns to Ennistone, the English spa town where he grew up, to arrange the future of his granddaughter Hattie. His former pupil George McCaffrey, who gave up philosophy and resents being dismissed by him, is already under suspicion in the town. The story is told by a narrator who calls himself only N.
The novel where she stops hiding the philosophy. Enormous, self-indulgent, and I’d still defend it.
— LisanneThe Good Apprentice
Edward Baltram gives his friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug as a joke, and Mark falls from a window and dies. Wrecked by guilt, Edward goes to Seegard, the remote house of his father Jesse, a painter living among women, while his stepbrother Stuart tries to live a life of pure goodness. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985.
About whether you can genuinely make up for something. She refuses the comfortable answer, which is why it lands.
— LisanneThe Book and the Brotherhood
A group of friends from Oxford have for years paid David Crimond, a Marxist theorist, to write a great political book that has never appeared, and whose politics most of them no longer share. When they press him for progress, the circle starts to come apart. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Old friends discovering they no longer agree about anything that mattered. The most middle-aged book she wrote, and I mean that as praise.
— LisanneThe Message to the Planet
Alfred Ludens, a young historian, seeks out his former teacher Marcus Vallar, a brilliant ex-mathematician and painter, believing he can save their friend Patrick Fenman, who is dying and believes Marcus has cursed him. Patrick recovers, rumours spread that Marcus is a healer, and crowds gather at the private clinic where he is taken.
A following forms around a man who may or may not know something. Late Murdoch, which means long.
— LisanneThe Green Knight
A reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the historian Lucas Graffe sets out to kill his brother Clement, and a stranger, Peter Mir, takes the blow instead. Mir survives and comes back to London to ask Lucas for justice.
Myth pressed up against a fairly ordinary London family. Strange, and I’m still not sure it works.
— LisanneJackson’s Dilemma
Edward Lannion’s bride-to-be disappears on the eve of their wedding, setting off a run of mishaps watched over by Jackson, an enigmatic servant. Murdoch was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease while writing it, and because she wrote by hand with few revisions, a 2004 University College London study used it to show how her vocabulary had narrowed compared with her earlier books.
You can hear the illness in the sentences, which makes it difficult to read as a novel. Read it last, or leave it.
— LisanneIn What Order to Read Iris Murdoch
They can be read in any order. None of the 26 novels is a sequel and no characters carry over, so publication order is useful only for watching her change. The early books, from Under the Net (1954) to The Time of the Angels (1966), are shorter and often comic. From The Nice and the Good (1968) to The Good Apprentice (1985) come her Booker Prize win, five of her Booker shortlistings, the James Tait Black and the Whitbread. The late novels, from The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) on, are longer and looser.
If you also want the philosophy, read The Sovereignty of Good (1970) next to The Black Prince (1973): the essays argue that moral life is a matter of seeing other people accurately, and the novel is narrated by a man who cannot. Leave Jackson’s Dilemma until last.
A reading path
1. Under the Net (1954)
2. The Bell (1958)
3. A Severed Head (1961)
4. The Black Prince (1973)
5. The Sea, The Sea (1978)
Philosophy, Plays and Poetry by Iris Murdoch
Beyond the 26 key novels: 11 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Philosophy
6
6 books · 1953–1997
- 1953Sartre: Romantic Rationalisther first book, and the first study of Sartre in English
- 1970The Sovereignty of Goodthree essays arguing that moral life is a matter of attention
- 1977The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artistson Plato’s case against art
- 1986Acastos: Two Platonic Dialoguesphilosophy written as drama
- 1992Metaphysics as a Guide to Moralsfrom her 1982 Gifford Lectures
- 1997Existentialists and Mysticscollected essays, edited by Peter Conradi
Plays and poetry
5
5 books · 1964–1997
- 1964A Severed Head (play)stage version, with J. B. Priestley
- 1968The Italian Girl (play)stage version, with James Saunders
- 1973The Three Arrows and The Servants and the Snowtwo plays, published together
- 1978A Year of Birdspoems, with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone
- 1997Poems by Iris Murdochedited by Paul Hullah and Yozo Muroya
The years · 1919–1999
Quick facts about Iris Murdoch
- Known for
- Novels about clever, articulate people deceiving themselves about love and their own motives, above all the Booker-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), and a moral philosophy built on the idea of attention.
- 1919
- Born in Dublin
- 1948
- Fellow in philosophy at St Anne’s, Oxford
- 1954
- Under the Net
- 1970
- The Sovereignty of Good
- 1978
- The Sea, The Sea
- 1999
- Dies in Oxford
- Born
- 15 July 1919, Phibsborough, Dublin; raised in London
- Education
- Somerville College, Oxford; Newnham College, Cambridge (1947–1948)
- Worked
- Fellow and tutor in philosophy, St Anne’s College, Oxford, 1948–1963
- Married
- The critic John Bayley, in 1956
- Honours
- Booker Prize (1978); CBE (1976); Dame (1987); Shakespeare Prize (1988); Golden PEN Award (1997)
- Died
- 8 February 1999, Oxford, aged 79
The red mark is 1978: The Sea, The Sea, the novel that won her the Booker Prize.
How Iris Murdoch Writes: The Same Question, Twenty-Six Times
Murdoch was a philosopher first: her first book was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), and she taught at St Anne’s College, Oxford, until 1963. Her novels are not illustrations of a thesis, but they rest on the argument of The Sovereignty of Good (1970): that the hard moral work is not choosing but seeing other people as they really are, and that the ego constantly gets in the way. Two of her best-known novels, The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea, are narrated by men who are plainly wrong about themselves, and the reader sees it long before they do.
She told The Paris Review in 1990 that she planned each book in detail before she began. The usual shape is a tight circle of eight or ten characters — in a country house, a London street, a religious community — each of whom misjudges several of the others, with plots driven by coincidence, sudden reversals and, often, a death. Obsessive love is her recurring subject, and she rarely treats it as romantic.
She wrote by hand and revised little, which is why researchers at University College London could later read the onset of Alzheimer’s in the manuscript of Jackson’s Dilemma. For writers who share her mix of ideas and comedy, see Authors like Iris Murdoch.
Frequently asked questions about Iris Murdoch’s books
How many books did Iris Murdoch write?
She published 26 novels between 1954 and 1995, all with Chatto & Windus, alongside six works of moral philosophy and a handful of plays and poems. Her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, appeared in 1995, four years before her death in 1999.
What are Iris Murdoch’s books in order?
Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Sandcastle (1957), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicorn (1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and the Green (1965), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A Word Child (1975), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995).
What is the best Iris Murdoch book to start with?
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.
What is Iris Murdoch’s most famous book?
The Sea, The Sea (1978), the only one of her novels to win the Booker Prize and still her most widely read. Among philosophers, her best-known book is The Sovereignty of Good (1970).
Which Iris Murdoch novel won the Booker Prize?
The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. It follows Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director who retreats to a house by the sea and becomes obsessed with the woman he loved as a teenager, and treats that obsession as a case study in self-deception.
How many times was Iris Murdoch nominated for the Booker Prize?
The Booker Prize counts seven of her 26 novels as 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 in 2010 for the Lost Man Booker Prize, the retrospective award for the novels of 1970.
What order should I read Iris Murdoch’s books in?
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, at its strongest between 1968 and 1985, longer and looser at the end.
Did Iris Murdoch write philosophy as well as novels?
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).
What is The Sovereignty of Good about?
It collects three essays arguing that morality is primarily a matter of attention rather than choice: the real work is learning to see other people accurately, because the ego constantly distorts the view, and by the time you reach the moment of decision the seeing has already decided what you will do. It is her best-known philosophical work and the argument underneath her novels.
What are Iris Murdoch’s novels generally about?
They return again and again 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, civil servants and academics whose sophistication does nothing to protect them.
Who was Iris Murdoch?
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.
How did Iris Murdoch die, and did she have dementia?
She died on 8 February 1999 in Oxford, aged 79, with Alzheimer’s disease. She was diagnosed after finishing her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), and the illness was already affecting her writing while she worked on it. Her husband John Bayley wrote about those years in a memoir published in the US as Elegy for Iris, which was filmed as Iris in 2001, with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as Murdoch.
Why do researchers study Jackson’s Dilemma?
Because Murdoch wrote by hand and revised very little, the novel is an unusually clean record of her writing in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. A 2004 study from University College London compared it with Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea and found her vocabulary measurably narrower, while her grammar had changed little. The researchers hoped such work would help detect the disease earlier.
What is A Severed Head about?
A Severed Head (1961) follows Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a wine merchant whose orderly life collapses when his wife Antonia 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. The Booker Prize’s guide calls it her funniest novel, and she adapted it for the stage with J. B. Priestley.
What is The Black Prince about?
The Black Prince (1973) is narrated by Bradley Pearson, a blocked and self-important writer who falls obsessively in love with Julian, the young daughter of his more successful friend Arnold Baffin. After his account, four of the 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.
Which Iris Murdoch novel is the shortest?
The Italian Girl (1964) is usually named as her shortest novel; the Booker Prize’s guide puts it at about 160 pages and suggests it for readers who are short of time. A Severed Head (1961) and The Bell (1958) are also on the shorter side.
Why does Iris Murdoch matter as a novelist?
Because she joined serious moral philosophy to 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.
Why were the books about Iris Murdoch’s last years controversial?
After her death, the public picture of Murdoch was shaped largely by her illness: John Bayley’s intimate memoirs of her Alzheimer’s and Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) were criticised for exposing her decline. A. N. Wilson, a friend, made that objection in Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (2003), which he called an “anti-biography”, though his own gossip about her private life was itself criticised; Galen Strawson called the book “mischievously revelatory”. Peter Conradi’s authorised biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), is the standard account of her life and work.
Footnotes
- Iris Murdoch — Wikipedia
- Iris Murdoch — The Booker Prizes
- Where to start with Iris Murdoch: a guide to her best novels — The Booker Prizes
- Iris Murdoch’s last novel reveals first signs of Alzheimer’s disease — UCL, 2004
- Murdoch, Iris (1919–1999) — Encyclopedia.com
- Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117 — The Paris Review, 1990
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
— Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, Chicago Review (1959)
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