Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a novelist and philosopher. Her first published book was Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), a study of the French philosopher, but she soon turned to fiction. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), was surprisingly classed with the 'angry young men' movement, but her quickly succeeding early novels, in particular The Bell (1958), soon established her as a novelist of originality and power free of any group associations, capable of combining a realistic mode with ready invention, fiery imagination, and mastery of comic situation.

In this 1976 study, A. S. Byatt examines Murdoch's fiction and main philosophical ideas, relating the two and providing the reader with illuminating insights into the larger dimensions of the novels. Her survey, which is not chronological, groups and interrelates the novels, picks out recurrent themes and presents the key ideas in the way likely to be most useful both to the student and to the many readers who read Murdoch with compulsive fascination.

A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.