Originally published in 1984, Iris Murdoch, widely regarded as one of the major British novelists of her generation at the time, was undoubtedly one of the most popular and prolific, having published twenty-one novels since 1954 (she went on to write many more). But the course of her fiction-writing career was regarded with unease by some of her readers in that it seemed marked by an increasing conservatism of approach which could not have been...