The Bell (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Description

A novel that offers uplifting lessons in love - now republished as part of the Vintage Classics Murdoch Series - six gorgeous editions of her best, funniest and most subversive novels published to mark her centenary. 'In this holy community she would play the witch.' Imber Court is a quiet haven for lost souls, a utopia for those who can neither live in the world, nor out of it. But beneath the gentle daily routines of this community run currents of supressed desire, religious yearning and a legend of disastrous love. Charming, indolent Dora arrives in their midst, and half-unwittingly conjures these submerged things to the surface. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH PERRY VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH- Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

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.

She's writing about the only things that matter - love, goodness and how to be happy -- Patrick Gale * Independent * The plot is both comical and moving, and it's a book that everyone who's ever been tempted to throw in the towel and become a hermit should read....despite the grand subjects at issue, the novel's tone is not at all dry or didactic - it is, on the contrary, wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social comedy reminiscent of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym -- Guardian Her characters are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force * New York Times * How bloody good her novels are - how intelligent, how lucent, how divinely crazy. They're fun - I'd forgotten that -- Sarah Waters * Guardian * Above all, she was a consummate story-teller, prodigiously inventive and generous, in the realist tradition of Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky * Independent *