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Who was the real Iris Murdoch? A selection of correspondence to friends and especially lovers offers insight into a complicated life

About a quarter of a century ago I marched into a publisher’s party in the Vauxhall Bridge Road in central London to find the vestibule occupied by a very elderly man and a somewhat younger female sidekick. “David,�� exclaimed my host, , who stood between the pair like a vigilant Sybil, “this is and Dame Iris Murdoch.�� As I struggled for something to say �� dumbstruck by this sudden access of talent and celebrity �� the baton was gamely seized by Dame Iris. “Are you very left wing?�� she straightaway demanded. I muttered something about being a member of the Labour party, but the author of was proudly astride what subsequent inquiry revealed to be one of her great 1980s hobby-horses. “I used to be,�� she declared. “But I’m not now. No. All because of�� �� and here the phantom italics positively fizzed in the air �� ��that dreadful man Scargill …���

One wouldn’t normally inflict this kind of retrospective stargazing on readers of a newspaper, were it not that the incident offers some idea of what it felt like to be tumbled into the slipstream of Murdoch’s very considerable personality �� a personality which, it turns out, was quite as breathlessly maintained throughout her six‑decade stint as a letter-writer. The woman who, as friends attest, enlivened train carriages on the Oxford to Paddington line with her views on the 1984-85 miners�� strike and the woman who addressed her friends, lovers and professional colleagues went about the business in exactly the same way: at all times impulsive, affectionate, brainy, loyal, free-associative and, at least occasionally, horribly vulnerable. The effect is oddly appealing and �� whatever you happen to feel about her novels �� deeply impressive.

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The life of this bohemian author was a pageant of narcissism, but it makes for a delightful read

Of all David “Bunny�� Garnett’s countless appearances in Bloomsbury journals, one of the most revealing turns up in ’s diary in December 1970. Here, our man, nearly 80, arrives for dinner “in a great state about his current love�� and her unwillingness to set up house with him in a remote part of France. “Why won’t she come away from it all and live with me and be my love?�� he plaintively inquires. It is left to Frances to point out that Bunny’s squeeze is not only several decades younger than him but has a great many concerns of her own to deal with and that the position of maîtresse en titre to a man of 78 in a cottage near Montcuq might not be an ideal career move.

This air of faint bewilderment �� a kind of eternal brow-furrowing over why people wouldn’t instantly fall in with Garnett’s sexual or professional plans �� is a feature of Sarah Knights’s exceedingly well-researched and (mostly) sympathetic biography of the author and publisher. The tocsin of pained incomprehension clangs yet more loudly in the late 1950s, when, married to a woman 26 years his junior and about to depart for Geneva to stay with his latest girlfriend, Bunny wonders why his wife is so unhappy. “She has four lovely children,�� he informs his diary, “a house she loves, no money worries, and is quite miserable.�� That Garnett himself might have been responsible for most of this misery seems scarcely to have occurred to him, but then he was that sort of chap.

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The life of this bohemian author was a pageant of narcissism, but it makes for a delightful read

Of all David “Bunny�� Garnett’s countless appearances in Bloomsbury journals, one of the most revealing turns up in ’s diary in December 1970. Here, our man, nearly 80, arrives for dinner “in a great state about his current love�� and her unwillingness to set up house with him in a remote part of France. “Why won’t she come away from it all and live with me and be my love?�� he plaintively inquires. It is left to Frances to point out that Bunny’s squeeze is not only several decades younger than him but has a great many concerns of her own to deal with and that the position of maîtresse en titre to a man of 78 in a cottage near Montcuq might not be an ideal career move.

This air of faint bewilderment �� a kind of eternal brow-furrowing over why people wouldn’t instantly fall in with Garnett’s sexual or professional plans �� is a feature of Sarah Knights’s exceedingly well-researched and (mostly) sympathetic biography of the author and publisher. The tocsin of pained incomprehension clangs yet more loudly in the late 1950s, when, married to a woman 26 years his junior and about to depart for Geneva to stay with his latest girlfriend, Bunny wonders why his wife is so unhappy. “She has four lovely children,�� he informs his diary, “a house she loves, no money worries, and is quite miserable.�� That Garnett himself might have been responsible for most of this misery seems scarcely to have occurred to him, but then he was that sort of chap.

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For some fiction writers she was the enemy, for others she was spellbinding and highly attractive. How have Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Anthony Powell, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter and others got to grips with the iron lady?

Anyone embarking on a crash-course in the literary politics of the 1980s is advised to begin with an article that Salman Rushdie contributed to the New Statesman on the eve of the 1983 general election. The tone, as Rushdie concedes, is practically Spenglerian, its basis the idea that all that is worst in a nation’s identity will ever so often slither to the surface and express itself in government. “There are, of course, many Britains, and many of them �� the sceptical, questioning, radical, reformist, libertarian, non-conformist Britains �� I have always admired greatly,�� Rushdie declares. “But these Britains are presently in retreat, even in disarray; while nanny-Britain, strait-laced Victorian values Britain, thin-lipped jingoist Britain, is in charge. Dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air.��

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Angela Carter pronounced Thatcher part-nanny, part-Elizabeth I as Gloriana and part-Countess Dracula

'We were jealous �� we could never have invented a character like this,' McEwan believes

This story of the Pickwick Papers�� prehistory dramatises the lives of those who were caught up in, and destroyed by, its triumph

Like many an early-Victorian classic �� is an obvious comparison �� came about largely by accident. Its original begetter was the melancholic artist who, in November 1835, suggested to Chapman and Hall that they underwrite a series of engravings about the adventures of a cockney sporting club. Text was required to accompany the monthly instalments and, after one or two unsuccessful try-outs, the publishers hired an up-and-coming 23-year-old named Charles Dickens, whose had just appeared in volume form. Dickens, being Dickens, instantly began to impress his considerable personality upon the project, and Seymour shot himself shortly after completing the plates for the second number.

Although Seymour seems to have been a career depressive, with several previous attempts at suicide behind him, there lurked a suspicion that the two events were connected, and that the artist had contributed more to the Pickwick juggernaut than the author, in his prefaces to later editions of this enduring bestseller, cared to admit. The widowed Mrs Seymour applied to Dickens for financial support and published a suggestive account of the proceedings. There were further rumblings in the 1860s when Robert Seymour junior began a correspondence in the Athenaeum. Dickens scholars usually contend that the debate about provenance is academic, as the serial didn’t take off until No 4, which introduced Mr Pickwick’s aide-de-camp, Sam Weller, and featured the distinctive artwork of Phiz.

By the 1970s a celebrated critic and comic novelist, Lodge had been a 1950s ‘new man��, at odds with the establishment. This autobiography is a sociologist’s paradise

One of the most tantalising fragments of David Lodge’s autobiography is the description of the day in 1959 when its hero, then aged 24, marries his long-term sweetheart, Mary Jacob. Even by the standards of the 1950s it has been a protracted courtship �� chaste, respectful, requiring frequent visits to the confession box and dating all the way back to the morning in 1952 when the two newly arrived undergraduates first set eyes on each other in an office at University College London. Triumphantly united with his bride, Burton suit encasing his quivering flanks, Lodge, according to one observer of the wedding photographs, “looked like the cat who had finally got the cream��.

And here the veteran Lodge-fancier will find memory tugging at his or her sleeve. Like �� a fictional exemplar several times invoked in the course of this life‑and-times �� incredulously fetched up at a requisitioned, war-bound Brideshead, we have been here before. A glance at Lodge’s sixth novel, (1980), confirms that more or less exactly the same description is applied to Dennis, the burly, acne-scarred, Anthony Eden-era chemistry graduate stalled at the altar with his altogether scrumptious but long-resisting fiancee, Angela. The latter, we are told, “looked beautiful��. Dennis resembled “the cat who was finally certain of getting the cream��.

By the 1970s a celebrated critic and comic novelist, Lodge had been a 1950s ‘new man��, at odds with the establishment. This autobiography is a sociologist’s paradise

One of the most tantalising fragments of David Lodge’s autobiography is the description of the day in 1959 when its hero, then aged 24, marries his long-term sweetheart, Mary Jacob. Even by the standards of the 1950s it has been a protracted courtship �� chaste, respectful, requiring frequent visits to the confession box and dating all the way back to the morning in 1952 when the two newly arrived undergraduates first set eyes on each other in an office at University College London. Triumphantly united with his bride, Burton suit encasing his quivering flanks, Lodge, according to one observer of the wedding photographs, “looked like the cat who had finally got the cream��.

And here the veteran Lodge-fancier will find memory tugging at his or her sleeve. Like �� a fictional exemplar several times invoked in the course of this life‑and-times �� incredulously fetched up at a requisitioned, war-bound Brideshead, we have been here before. A glance at Lodge’s sixth novel, (1980), confirms that more or less exactly the same description is applied to Dennis, the burly, acne-scarred, Anthony Eden-era chemistry graduate stalled at the altar with his altogether scrumptious but long-resisting fiancee, Angela. The latter, we are told, “looked beautiful��. Dennis resembled “the cat who was finally certain of getting the cream��.

Passionate, risk-taking, aesthetically conservative: a compendious biography of Proust's great interpreter reveals the paradoxes of his varied career

"There is some hope," the 21-year-old informed his diary on 6 April 1925, "of a secretaryship in Florence with a homosexual translator." To Waugh, lately down from Oxford, sans degree and working in a flyblown prep school, the job seemed a godsend. For a month and more he sustained himself on the prospect of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe". Then, on 30 June, the blow fell: "Scott Moncrieff does not want me." As Jean Findlay notes in this compendious biography of the translator of , Stendhal and Pirandello, the rejection precipitated a crisis in Waugh's affairs. Shortly afterwards, he attempted �� unsuccessfully �� to drown himself.

However indirect the acquaintance – although the unwanted secretary was to visit him on his deathbed �� Scott Moncrieff's connection with Waugh is a mark of the large number of distinct, though sometimes interconnected, worlds in which he contrived to operate throughout his 1920s heyday. His mentor JC Squire, arch-reactionary editor of the London Mercury, once declared of himself that he was a centipede with a foot in a hundred camps, and the same, up to a point, could be said of his protege. On the one hand, he was a Winchester and Edinburgh University-educated Scottish gentleman and first-world-war army officer, whose friends included the son of a future prime minister and whose hereditary alliances extended all the way to the War Office. On the other, a host of factors, from his religion, his sexual inclinations and his professional life, bore him off into landscapes where gentlemanly Wykehamists were less likely to be found. His conversion to Catholicism propelled him into the orbit of charismatic coreligionists such as , Monsignor Benson and Ronald Knox. His homosexuality led him to the remnants of the Wilde circle and friendships with Robert Ross and the bookseller Christopher Millard, who may well have seduced him. And, to take only one postwar job offer, there can't be many gay translators who found themselves asked to write the official history of the King's Own Scottish Borderers.

Passionate, risk-taking, aesthetically conservative: a compendious biography of Proust's great interpreter reveals the paradoxes of his varied career

"There is some hope," the 21-year-old informed his diary on 6 April 1925, "of a secretaryship in Florence with a homosexual translator." To Waugh, lately down from Oxford, sans degree and working in a flyblown prep school, the job seemed a godsend. For a month and more he sustained himself on the prospect of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe". Then, on 30 June, the blow fell: "Scott Moncrieff does not want me." As Jean Findlay notes in this compendious biography of the translator of , Stendhal and Pirandello, the rejection precipitated a crisis in Waugh's affairs. Shortly afterwards, he attempted �� unsuccessfully �� to drown himself.

However indirect the acquaintance – although the unwanted secretary was to visit him on his deathbed �� Scott Moncrieff's connection with Waugh is a mark of the large number of distinct, though sometimes interconnected, worlds in which he contrived to operate throughout his 1920s heyday. His mentor JC Squire, arch-reactionary editor of the London Mercury, once declared of himself that he was a centipede with a foot in a hundred camps, and the same, up to a point, could be said of his protege. On the one hand, he was a Winchester and Edinburgh University-educated Scottish gentleman and first-world-war army officer, whose friends included the son of a future prime minister and whose hereditary alliances extended all the way to the War Office. On the other, a host of factors, from his religion, his sexual inclinations and his professional life, bore him off into landscapes where gentlemanly Wykehamists were less likely to be found. His conversion to Catholicism propelled him into the orbit of charismatic coreligionists such as , Monsignor Benson and Ronald Knox. His homosexuality led him to the remnants of the Wilde circle and friendships with Robert Ross and the bookseller Christopher Millard, who may well have seduced him. And, to take only one postwar job offer, there can't be many gay translators who found themselves asked to write the official history of the King's Own Scottish Borderers.

Passionate, risk-taking, aesthetically conservative: a compendious biography of Proust's great interpreter reveals the paradoxes of his varied career

"There is some hope," the 21-year-old informed his diary on 6 April 1925, "of a secretaryship in Florence with a homosexual translator." To Waugh, lately down from Oxford, sans degree and working in a flyblown prep school, the job seemed a godsend. For a month and more he sustained himself on the prospect of "a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe". Then, on 30 June, the blow fell: "Scott Moncrieff does not want me." As Jean Findlay notes in this compendious biography of the translator of , Stendhal and Pirandello, the rejection precipitated a crisis in Waugh's affairs. Shortly afterwards, he attempted unsuccessfully to drown himself.

However indirect the acquaintance  although the unwanted secretary was to visit him on his deathbed Scott Moncrieff's connection with Waugh is a mark of the large number of distinct, though sometimes interconnected, worlds in which he contrived to operate throughout his 1920s heyday. His mentor JC Squire, arch-reactionary editor of the London Mercury, once declared of himself that he was a centipede with a foot in a hundred camps, and the same, up to a point, could be said of his protege. On the one hand, he was a Winchester and Edinburgh University-educated Scottish gentleman and first-world-war army officer, whose friends included the son of a future prime minister and whose hereditary alliances extended all the way to the War Office. On the other, a host of factors, from his religion, his sexual inclinations and his professional life, bore him off into landscapes where gentlemanly Wykehamists were less likely to be found. His conversion to Catholicism propelled him into the orbit of charismatic coreligionists such as , Monsignor Benson and Ronald Knox. His homosexuality led him to the remnants of the Wilde circle and friendships with Robert Ross and the bookseller Christopher Millard, who may well have seduced him. And, to take only one postwar job offer, there can't be many gay translators who found themselves asked to write the official history of the King's Own Scottish Borderers.