Iris Murdoch (1919-1998) certainly ranks among the best English novelists of the second half 20th century. Her novels are classified into three types:

a) the novel of tricks, where plotting dominates: “Under the Net”, “The Flight from the Enchanter, “A Severed Head”, ”The Italian Girl”, “The Red and the Green”;

b) the novel characterized by deepening of the character: ”The Bell”’ “An Unofficial Rose”;

c) the increasingly religious type of the novel, that is concerned with the enactment of good and evil: “The Sandcastle”, “The Bell”, “The Unicorn” “The Time of the Angels”.

She wrote her first novel, Under the Net in 1954, having previously published essays on philosophy, including the first study in English of J.-P. Sartre.. It was at Oxford in 1956 that she met and marriedJohn Bayley, a professor of English literature and also a novelist. She went on to produce 25 more novels and other works of philosophy and drama until 1995. She died, aged 79, in 1999 and her ashes were scattered in the garden at the Oxford Crematorium. She was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the film Iris (2001), based on Bayley's memories of his wife.

Murdoch's novels are by turns intense and bizarre, filled with dark humor and unpredictable plot twists, undercutting the civilized surface of the usually intellectual upper middle-class milieu in which her characters are observed. Above all they deal with issues of morality, and the conflicts between good and evil are often presented in mundane scenes that gain mythic and tragic force through the subtlety with which they are depicted. Though intellectually sophisticated, her novels are often melodramatic and comedic, rooted, she famously said, in the desire to tell a "jolly good yarn."

She was strongly influenced by philosophers and by the 19th century English and Russian novelists, especially Dostoyevsky, Proust and Shakespeare. Her novels often include upper middle class intellectual males caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children. Although she wrote primarily in a realistic manner, on occasion Murdoch would introduce symbolism and ambiguity into her work, and by mixing elements of fantasy within her precisely described scenes. The Unicorn (1963) can be read as a sophisticated Gothic novel, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing. The Black Prince (1973) is a study of erotic obsession, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator.

Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a finely detailed novel about love and loss, featuring a retired stage director who is overwhelmed by feelings when he meets his lover after several decades apart.

Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels An Unofficial Rose and The Bell.

She objected to be called a philosophical novelist, though the term seems to be ready-made for her, as she was a professional philosopher. Her method was termed “transcendental” realism. This term means she opens a novel in a conventional way, but then there is an eruption of the unexpected.