“People fall in and out of love at breakneck speed, and act in the most undignified and preposterous ways for reasons so insubstantial or intensely personal that it is hard to identify with them unless you perceive yourself to be equally ridiculous and changeable – which I absolutely do. “What I love most about Murdoch’s writing is its accuracy in portraying the human experience at its most passionate and comically absurd,” says the novelist Sophie Hannah, who has written the introduction to Murdoch’s reissued 1973 novel The Black Prince. Last year, when I took part in the Cheltenham literary festival’s annual Booker prize event – a classy balloon debate to determine who might have won the prize in the years before its invention – Murdoch’s The Bell(1958), championed by Madeleine Thien, only narrowly lost out to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

D o Iris Murdoch’s novels still matter to people? Or, after the high-water mark of her Booker-winning 1978 novel, The Sea, The Sea, and a late period of longer, more philosophically abstruse books, did her work collapse into her biography – the jumble of love affairs, absurdly messy kitchens and Alzheimer’s disease that were dramatised by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the 2001 film of her life? And, once the attention paid to her life had abated, had contemporary fiction simply moved on?Ī set of reissues to mark her centenary this week suggest that her 26 novels still resonate with novelists such as Sarah Perry, Daisy Johnson and Garth Greenwell, who have written new introductions to the works.

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