The Sea, The Sea. A Severed Head; Everyman, 2016

Two novels demonstrating how this grande dameof English literature produced sophisticated philosophical fiction without compromising her belief that literature was to be 'grasped by enjoyment'. Includes the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea. An excellent addition to Everyman's growing number of Contemporary Classic omnibus editions.

First published in 1961, The Severed Headis regarded is one of Iris Murdoch’s most entertaining works. A dark and ferocious comic masterpiece, the novel traces the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, well-to-do London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst.

In The Sea, the Seathe landscape shifts to the seclusion of an isolated house on the edge of England’s North Sea, where Charles Arrowby, a big name in London’s glittering theatrical world, has retired to write his memoirs. Arrowby’s plans begin to unravel when he meets his first love and becomes haunted by the idea of rekindling his adolescent passion.

The Severed Head and Booker prize-winner The Sea, the Sea are two of Iris Murdoch’s most accomplished novels, displaying all her talent for combining profundity with playful creativity. Both tragic and comic, brooding and hilarious, they brilliantly reveal how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves as well as our all-consuming desire for love, significance and, ultimately, redemption.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents and was brought up in London, where her parents moved soon after she was born. She published her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She was a prolific writer and went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays and poetry.

She read classics at Somerville College, Oxford and worked as assistant principal at the British Treasury during the war. In 1947 she studied philosophy at Cambridge University at a time when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a leading professor in the department. She returned to Oxford in 1948 and became a philosophy Fellow at St Anne’s College, a position she retained for the next twenty years, during which time she wrote several major philosophical works.

In her novels, Iris Murdoch’s brilliant writing about the life of the mind, human consciousness and the way profound moral issues are played out in everyday life made her one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century.

She won the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, the Sea in 1978, the Royal Society Literary Award in 1987 and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.

In 1995, aged 76, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In that same year she published her last novel Jackson’s Dilemma. She died in 1999. Her struggle with Alzheimer’s and the devotion with which she was cared for by her husband, the scholar and critic John Bayley, were dramatized in the 2001 film Iris, in which she was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.