Iris Murdoch Died 27 Years Ago, and We Still Haven't Figured Out What She Was Telling Us

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.