Book description
Nine characters in a tangled web, all looking for love. Hugh's wife of
forty years has recently died. Hugh's old mistress Emma appears at the
funeral, and Hugh falls in love again, while his son Randall, unhappy in
marriage to Ann, becomes besotted with Emma's live-in companion Lindsey.
Meanwhile Mildred has her sights set on widowed Hugh, while Ann is in
love with Mildred's brother. Confused?
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She
went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville
College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the
Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria.
She held a studentship in Philosophy at Newham College, Cambridge, and
then in 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a Fellow of St
Anne's College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with her
husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded the
CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's
Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for
Distinguished Service to Literature.
Since her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net, Iris
Murdoch has written twenty-six novels, including the Booker
Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea
(1978) and most recently The Green Knight (1993)
and Jackson's Dilemma (1995). Other literary awards include the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and
the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
(1974). Her works of philosophy include Satire: Romantic
Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and
Existentialists and Mystics (1997). She has written several
plays including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and
The Black Prince, adapted from her novel of the same name.
Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds, which appeared in 1978,
has been set to music by Malcolm Williamson.
