What an absolute darling you are!

Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea, the Sea, and an equally gripping rendition, on Woman’s Hour, of A Severed Head. Her books are distinguished by the rate at which her characters fall in and out of love with one another, usually leaving streams of chaos and pain behind them.

Iris’s letters, especially the ones which were written before she began to write novels, were blueprints for the fiction. In one confessional epistle, to David Hicks — not the interior designer, but an Oxford chum of the same name who had become a British Council lecturer — she outlined the state of play in November 1945:

I went to live with a young man whom I did not love but whom I was sorry for because he was in love with me, and because he has a complex about women (because of a homosexual past) and because he was about to be sent abroad at any moment.