Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STEPHEN MEDCALF
When Marian Taylor takes the post of governess at Gaze castle,
remote house on a beautiful but desolate coast, she finds herself
confronted with many strange mysteries. What kind of crime or
catastrophe in the past still keeps the house under a brooding spell?
And is her employer Hannah an innocent victim, a guilty woman, a
lunatic, or a witch?
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 Newnham 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.
Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the
Net, and went on to write twenty-six novels, including the Booker
prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). Other literary awards
include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black
Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Book Award)
for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of
philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and
Mystics (1997) She wrote several plays including The Italian
Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince, adapted
from her novels of the same name. She died in February 1999.
