ABSTRACT
This part of the book considers the theme of gender and learning – or where possible, gender and philosophy in particular – as it appears in a selection of novels from different phases of Iris Murdoch’s career. The resulting case studies do not necessarily focus on what I would regard as Murdoch’s finest imaginative works (though they include some of my own favourites), and I have not made a point of developing all of them at equal length, preferring instead to follow where the present enquiry seemed to lead. Accordingly, readers whose interest in Murdoch is primarily literary may wonder if a disproportionate amount of space has been devoted to the ‘loose, baggy monsters’ of her later years. These challenging novels deserve attention, however, both for their reflective depiction of contemporary intellectual life and for the wealth of less deliberate ideological expression which they contain.
