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Here's a confession that might get me banned from every book club in London: I've read The Sea, the Sea three times, and I'm still not entirely sure whether the narrator is a genius, a lunatic, or just the most insufferable dinner party guest in literary history. That's not a criticism—that's the highest praise I can offer Iris Murdoch, who died on February 8th, 1999, leaving behind a body of work that continues to confuse, seduce, and occasionally infuriate readers who thought they knew what novels were supposed to do.

Twenty-seven years since Murdoch shuffled off this mortal coil, and here we are, still arguing about her books at wine bars, still assigning them in philosophy seminars, still discovering that the person we're dating has a suspiciously dog-eared copy of Under the Net on their nightstand (run or marry them immediately—there's no middle ground). The woman published twenty-six novels, and somehow managed to make each one feel like she was personally reaching into your skull and rearranging the furniture.

Let's talk about Under the Net for a moment, her 1954 debut that announced to the literary world: a new weird kid has arrived, and she's read way too much Sartre. Jake Donaghue stumbles through London like a philosophical pinball, bouncing between women, jobs, and existential crises with the grace of someone who's had three pints too many but insists they're fine to walk home. The novel reads like Murdoch took the French existentialists, dunked them in the Thames, and wrung them out over Soho. It shouldn't work. It absolutely works.

But here's where Murdoch gets genuinely dangerous: she was a trained philosopher, and unlike most academics who dabble in fiction, she didn't leave her brain at the university gates. Her novels aren't philosophical in the tedious way—no characters monologuing about Being and Nothingness while staring meaningfully at rain. Instead, she infected every scene, every dialogue, every description with genuine moral inquiry. You'd be reading about someone making tea and suddenly realize you were three pages deep into a meditation on attention, goodness, and whether love is even possible between two inherently selfish humans.

The Black Prince, published in 1973, might be her masterpiece—or her most elaborate practical joke on readers. Bradley Pearson, our narrator, is a pompous blocked writer who falls catastrophically in love with his rival's daughter. The novel comes wrapped in multiple forewords and postscripts from other characters, each contradicting Bradley's account. Who's telling the truth? Everyone. No one. The truth isn't the point. Murdoch seems to be cackling from beyond the pages: you wanted a reliable narrator? In THIS economy?

Then there's The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978 and remains one of the strangest books to ever claim that particular honor. Charles Arrowby, a retired theater director with an ego the size of the North Atlantic, retreats to a coastal house to write his memoirs and accidentally becomes obsessed with his childhood sweetheart. What follows is either a ghost story, a psychological thriller, a Buddhist parable, or the world's longest letter from a man who desperately needs therapy. Probably all four.

What makes Murdoch feel so urgently contemporary isn't her plots—which, let's be honest, often involve upper-middle-class English people having affairs in drawing rooms. It's her obsessive interest in how we lie to ourselves. Every Murdoch protagonist thinks they're the hero of their own story, acting from pure motives, seeing things clearly. And every Murdoch novel systematically demolishes that fantasy. In an age of carefully curated Instagram personas and main-character syndrome, reading her feels less like visiting the past and more like looking in a very unflattering mirror.

She also wrote about love in ways that make modern romance novels look like instruction manuals. Murdoch's love is violent, irrational, frequently misdirected, and absolutely devastating. Her characters don't fall in love—they plummet, often toward people who are terrible for them, often while being terrible themselves. She understood that desire isn't some pure force but something entangled with ego, projection, and the desperate need to not be alone with our own consciousness.

The philosophical underpinnings matter too. Murdoch studied under Wittgenstein at Cambridge, corresponded with existentialists, wrote serious works on Sartre and Plato. Her 1970 essay The Sovereignty of Good remains assigned reading in ethics courses, arguing that moral improvement requires learning to see reality clearly—to pay genuine attention to others rather than filtering everything through our own fantasies. Her novels are that theory in action, showing us characters who fail spectacularly at seeing anything clearly, inviting us to recognize ourselves in their blindness.

Twenty-seven years dead, and Murdoch's influence ripples through contemporary literature in ways we don't always notice. Every novelist who treats unreliable narration as a moral investigation rather than a mere trick owes her something. Every writer who asks whether their characters are truly free or just performing freedom is walking paths she mapped. The current boom in literary fiction that takes philosophy seriously without becoming unreadable? Murdoch was doing that when most of today's authors were in diapers.

Here's my controversial take: Murdoch is more relevant now than she was at her death. In 1999, we still believed in the possibility of authentic selfhood, of breaking through our delusions to some true core. Social media hadn't yet revealed how infinitely we can deceive ourselves while broadcasting that deception to thousands. Murdoch always knew. She spent her career anatomizing the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are, and that gap has only widened since she left.

If you haven't read her, start with Under the Net—it's short, funny, and relatively accessible. If that hooks you, move to The Black Prince for the full Murdoch experience: unsettling, brilliant, and guaranteed to make you trust narrators slightly less for the rest of your life. The Sea, the Sea requires commitment, but it rewards you with one of the most perfectly realized unreliable narrators in English literature.

Iris Murdoch was Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a philosophical heavyweight, and by all accounts a genuinely weird person who kept a stuffed owl in her office and believed in the power of art to make us morally better. Whether that last belief was naïve or prophetic remains an open question—one she would have loved us to keep asking, probably while drinking red wine and talking about Plato.

She's been dead for twenty-seven years, and she's still the most interesting person at the party.

Here's a confession that might get me banned from literary circles: I didn't understand Iris Murdoch the first time I read her. Or the second. It took me three attempts at 'The Sea, the Sea' before I stopped throwing it across the room in frustration and started seeing what all the fuss was about. And that, my friends, is precisely the point.

Twenty-seven years ago today, on February 8, 1999, one of the most brilliantly infuriating minds in twentieth-century literature went silent. Dame Iris Murdoch, philosopher-turned-novelist, left us with twenty-six novels, a handful of plays, and enough moral philosophy to give Immanuel Kant a migraine. She also left us perpetually confused about whether we're supposed to like her characters or diagnose them.

Let's talk about 'The Sea, the Sea' for a moment, the 1978 Booker Prize winner that made Murdoch a household name—at least in households with overflowing bookshelves and a tendency toward existential crisis. The protagonist, Charles Arrowby, is a retired theater director who retreats to the seaside to write his memoirs and promptly becomes obsessed with his childhood sweetheart. Sounds romantic? It's not. It's a masterclass in watching a man convince himself that stalking is love and that his version of events is the only one that matters. Murdoch didn't write heroes; she wrote humans, with all their grotesque self-delusion intact.

This is what makes her relevant today—perhaps more relevant than when she was alive. We live in an age of curated self-presentation, where everyone is the protagonist of their own Instagram story. Murdoch saw this coming. She understood that humans are fundamentally unreliable narrators of their own lives, that we construct elaborate fantasies to avoid facing uncomfortable truths. Charles Arrowby isn't some dated literary creation; he's your uncle who won't stop talking about the one who got away, your colleague who rewrites every meeting in their favor, possibly even you when you tell yourself that third glass of wine was 'self-care.'

'Under the Net,' her 1954 debut, is deceptively light for a philosophical novel—a picaresque romp through London featuring a struggling writer, a borrowed dog, and a film studio break-in. But beneath the comedy lies Murdoch's obsession with language and its limitations. Jake Donaghue spends the novel misunderstanding everyone around him because he's trapped in his own interpretive framework. Sound familiar? We now have entire academic fields dedicated to studying how our cognitive biases filter reality. Murdoch got there first, and she made it funny.

Then there's 'The Black Prince,' possibly her most audacious work. Bradley Pearson, another writer (Murdoch clearly had opinions about her profession), becomes entangled in a passionate affair with the daughter of his literary rival. The novel is framed by multiple competing forewords and postscripts from other characters, each contradicting Bradley's account. It's unreliable narration taken to its logical extreme—a Rashomon for the Hampstead set. Reading it today feels like scrolling through a Twitter discourse where everyone has their own 'truth' and reality itself becomes negotiable.

Critics often accused Murdoch of being too clever, too philosophical, too obsessed with the upper-middle classes and their romantic entanglements. Fair enough. You won't find much working-class representation in her novels, and her characters do spend an awful lot of time drinking sherry and having affairs in country houses. But dismissing her on these grounds misses the forest for the trees. Murdoch used the drawing room as her laboratory because she was interested in the laboratory of the mind—how people construct meaning, deceive themselves, and occasionally, against all odds, achieve moments of genuine moral clarity.

Her philosophy background wasn't decoration; it was the engine of her fiction. A student of Wittgenstein, a colleague of Philippa Foot, Murdoch spent decades grappling with questions of morality, attention, and what she called 'unselfing'—the difficult process of seeing beyond our ego-driven perceptions to recognize the reality of other people. Her novels are thought experiments in narrative form, asking: What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to truly see another person? How do we escape the prison of our own consciousness?

These questions haven't gotten easier in the twenty-seven years since her death. If anything, our attention has become more fractured, our echo chambers more fortified, our capacity for 'unselfing' more compromised. Murdoch would have had a field day with social media, though I suspect she'd have approached it the way she approached everything—with rigorous analysis, a raised eyebrow, and possibly a sardonic novel about a philosopher who becomes addicted to online validation.

The tragedy of her final years—the gradual erosion of her brilliant mind to Alzheimer's disease, documented with painful honesty in her husband John Bayley's memoir—adds another dimension to her legacy. Here was a woman who spent her life celebrating the power of consciousness, of attention, of careful moral reasoning, forced to watch those capacities slip away. The cruel irony wasn't lost on anyone. And yet, perhaps there's something appropriate about a philosopher of perception ending with perception itself unraveled, proving that the mind she spent her career examining was as fragile as it was powerful.

So why read Iris Murdoch in 2026? Because she makes you uncomfortable in productive ways. Because she refuses to let you settle into easy moral judgments. Because her characters are magnificent disasters who reveal, through their failures, what genuine goodness might look like. Because she understood that attention—real attention, the kind that requires effort and humility—is the foundation of ethics. And because, frankly, we could all use a reminder that we are not the protagonists of the universe, that other people are as real as we are, and that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are usually, to put it charitably, fiction.

Twenty-seven years gone, and Iris Murdoch remains gloriously difficult, stubbornly relevant, and absolutely essential. If you haven't read her, start with 'Under the Net' for the wit or 'The Sea, the Sea' for the full philosophical gut-punch. If you have read her, read her again—you'll find things you missed. That's the Murdoch paradox: the more attention you pay, the more there is to see. She'd have appreciated the irony.