A Severed Head - by Iris Murdoch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea

Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, "this is nothing to do with happiness."

A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.

Review Quotes

Praise for Iris Murdoch and A Severed Head

"Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." --The Millions

"Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty." --Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times

"In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world. I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me." --Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement

"Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts." --Walter Allen, The New York Times

"The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement." --Elizabeth Jane Howard

"Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply." --Philip Toynbee

About the Author

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most acclaimed British writers of the twentieth century. Very prolific, she wrote twenty-six novels, four books of philosophy, five plays, a volume of poetry, a libretto, and numerous essays before developing Alzheimer's disease in the mid-1990s. Her novels have won many prizes: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince, the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea. She herself was also the recipient of many esteemed awards: Dame of the Order of the British Empire, the Royal Society of Literature's Companion of Literature award, and the National Arts Club's Medal of Honor for Literature. In 2008 she was named one of the London Times's 50 greatest British writers since 1945.