A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Description

The most important novelist writing in my time A. S. Byatt Hilda Foster is alone in an isolated cottage when she receives an important telephone call. She must get in touch with her husband but it is virtually impossible. How can she avert the crisis? Hilda's troubles began when she trusts a slippery intellectual called Julius King who decides to demonstrate how he can persuade easily loving couples, caring friends, and devoted siblings to betray their loyalties to one another. Melodramatic incidents, purloined letters, apparently unmotivated actions abound as this dark comedy of errors unfolds.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She read Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, and after working in the Treasury and abroad, was awarded a research studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948 she returned to Oxford as fellow and tutor at St Anne's College and later taught at the Royal College of Art. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 and in the 1997 PEN Awards received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature. Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net. Her twenty-six novels include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her philosophy includes Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); other philosophical writings, including The Sovereignty of Good (1970), are collected in Existentialists and Mystics (1997).

The most important novelist writing in my time * A.S. Byatt * A distinguished novelist of a very rare kind * Kingsley Amis * Of all the novelists that have made their bow since the war she seems to me to be the most remarkable-behind her books one feels a power of intellect quite exceptional in a novelist * Sunday Times *