Iris Murdoch Died 27 Years Ago, and We Still Haven't Figured Out What the Hell She Was Talking About

Here's a confession that might get me banned from every book club in existence: the first time I tried to read 'The Sea, the Sea,' I threw it across the room. Not because it was bad—God, no—but because Iris Murdoch had the audacity to make me feel like the intellectual equivalent of a golden retriever staring at a calculus equation. Twenty-seven years after her death, this Irish-born philosopher-novelist continues to haunt our literary consciousness like a particularly well-read ghost who refuses to dumb things down for the rest of us.

Iris Murdoch died on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, succumbing to Alzheimer's disease—a cruel irony for a woman whose entire career was built on the architecture of the mind. She left behind twenty-six novels, a mountain of philosophical treatises, and generations of readers who still argue about whether her characters are profound or just profoundly irritating. Spoiler alert: they're both.

Let's talk about 'Under the Net,' her 1954 debut that basically invented a whole new way of being confused in English literature. Jake Donaghue, our hapless protagonist, stumbles through London like a philosophical pinball, bouncing between women, odd jobs, and existential crises. The novel reads like someone fed Sartre and P.G. Wodehouse into a blender and hit 'puree.' Critics called it picaresque. I call it the literary equivalent of watching someone's quarter-life crisis in real-time, except somehow it makes you question everything you thought you knew about truth and language. Murdoch wasn't just writing stories; she was performing intellectual surgery without anesthesia.

'The Black Prince' from 1973 might be her most deliciously unhinged work. Bradley Pearson, a fifty-eight-year-old writer who hasn't written anything in years, falls obsessively in love with his rival's twenty-year-old daughter. Yes, it's uncomfortable. Yes, it's supposed to be. Murdoch never met a moral gray area she didn't want to explore with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. The novel comes with multiple postscripts from different characters, each contradicting the others, because apparently Murdoch thought regular unreliable narrators were too easy. She wanted unreliable everything.

But here's where Murdoch gets genuinely subversive, and why she matters more now than ever. In an age where we're drowning in self-help mantras about 'living your truth' and 'following your heart,' Murdoch would have laughed herself hoarse. Her entire philosophical project was about how spectacularly bad we are at seeing reality clearly. We're all trapped in what she called 'the fat relentless ego,' constructing elaborate fantasies about ourselves and others. Her novels don't offer redemption arcs or tidy resolutions. They offer the terrifying possibility that we might never really know anyone—including ourselves.

'The Sea, the Sea,' which won the Booker Prize in 1978, is essentially a 500-page masterclass in self-delusion. Charles Arrowby, a retired theater director, retreats to a coastal house to write his memoirs and achieve inner peace. Instead, he becomes obsessed with a childhood sweetheart, attempts to essentially kidnap her, and descends into what can only be described as high-brow stalking. It's uncomfortable, brilliant, and infuriatingly human. Murdoch understood that the monsters aren't always obvious; sometimes they're cultured men who quote Shakespeare while destroying lives.

What makes Murdoch essential reading in 2026 is her unflinching examination of obsessive love—not the romantic comedy kind, but the kind that devours. Her characters don't fall in love; they fall into obsession, projection, and elaborate psychological games. In an era of parasocial relationships, online stalking, and the commodification of intimacy, her dissections of how we construct the objects of our desire feel prophetic. She was writing about the dangers of the male gaze before we had a term for it.

Murdoch was also, let's not forget, one of the twentieth century's most important moral philosophers. Her book 'The Sovereignty of Good' argued that genuine morality requires attention—the patient, humble act of really seeing other people as they are, not as we wish them to be. In a world of hot takes, snap judgments, and algorithmic echo chambers, her call for slow, careful moral perception feels almost radical. She believed goodness was possible but difficult, requiring constant effort against our natural self-centeredness. No shortcuts. No life hacks. Just the hard, unglamorous work of paying attention.

Her influence on contemporary literature runs deeper than most readers realize. Every novelist who writes about intellectuals behaving badly owes her a debt. Every exploration of obsessive love, every unreliable narrator who doesn't know they're unreliable, every novel that refuses easy moral categorization—Murdoch was there first, doing it better, with more philosophical depth. Writers like Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney, and Zadie Smith have all acknowledged her shadow.

The tragedy of her final years—watching Alzheimer's slowly dismantle one of the century's greatest minds—was documented with heartbreaking honesty by her husband John Bayley in 'Elegy for Iris.' The 2001 film adaptation starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench brought her story to wider audiences, though it necessarily simplified her intellectual legacy. Murdoch deserves to be remembered not just as a tragic figure, but as the fierce, funny, occasionally infuriating writer who dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we're all a little less good than we think we are.

So here we are, twenty-seven years later, still grappling with the questions she raised. Still uncomfortable. Still confused. Still, if we're honest, a little bit in love with her difficult, demanding, gloriously imperfect novels. Iris Murdoch didn't write books you enjoy—she wrote books that change you, whether you like it or not. And in a literary landscape increasingly dominated by comfort reads and algorithmic recommendations, that kind of challenging, unapologetic brilliance feels more necessary than ever. Pick up one of her novels today. Just maybe don't throw it across the room.