‘What is she afraid of?’

With the results of our case studies to hand, it is time to return to the question introduced in Chapter 1, namely: where are we to place Iris Murdoch in relation to the ‘feminism of freedom’1 inspired by Beauvoir, and to the politics of ‘women’s liberation’ which emerged from it in the 1960s? Should we view her repeated declarations of interest in such a politics as discredited, in the final analysis, by the evidence we have amassed of her (scarcely less marked) resistance to it – a body of evidence embracing both the considered utterances of the philosopher and the more ambiguous expressive gestures of the artist? Or can we press these signs of resistance into service to illuminate some of the darker corners of our own cultural ‘imaginary’? These are the issues that will occupy us in the final chapter of the book.