“To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.”

Irish and British novelist and philosopher

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Born in 1919 and active in the twentieth century, she is known for fiction that explored moral choice, desire, good and evil, and the hidden workings of the mind. Her first novel, Under the Net, appeared in 1954 and was later named by Modern Library among the best English-language novels of the century. The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. She was made a Dame in 1987 for services to literature, and her work was later placed high on lists of major British writers.