![]() Her fiction is so extremely unfashionable that, to have reached this point, you’re a brave pioneer, virtually a Scott of the Antarctic of mid-twentieth-century novels. ![]() Is this the first Iris Murdoch novel you have ever picked up? If so, you are not alone. Look further back, into post-war British fiction how many of the great women writers, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark and, above all, Iris Murdoch, are read today? Rather than take them seriously, it is easier to side-line them they’re too middle-class, too silly, too concerned with love, family, the endurance and pain and joy of domestic life to be important. In discussions of contemporary fiction, Toni Morrison, Ruth Rendell, Hilary Mantel, Ursula Le Guin, even Margaret Atwood rarely receive the worship heaped on Roth or Amis, Mankell or Franzen. Despite their genre-defining brilliance, Lucretia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sally Wainwright receive little of the reverence given to their male peers. Twentieth and, inevitably, twenty-first century literature, television, film, are packed with female writers whose work is dismissed. ![]() If you care about fiction, this should make you furious. ![]() Iris Murdoch is grievously misunderstood. ![]()
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