It’s perhaps fortunate that youth and circumstance prevented for some considerable time my investigating such moral dilemmas other than through literature. To the adolescent me, this kind of moral restlessness seemed exciting, even inviting. I did have vague, undefined yearnings for a life rather different from that apparently offered by a medium sized English cathedral town, and I remember realising that behind the respectable Georgian and Victorian bay windows and the cared for hedges and lawns of the newer suburbs all sorts of turmoils, heartaches, and excitements might well be occurring. Neither Lehmann’s nor Murdoch’s work completely reflected the world I lived in I had no expectation of being a debutante nor had I much experience with the kinds of emotional and moral quandary raised in The Sandcastle, a novel about a schoolmaster with political ambitions who has an affair with an artist. What I remember most about the experience of reading those two works was the change in mood and mode from Oliver Twist and The Mayor of Casterbridge. She also recommended Rosamund Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz. The first novel I read by Iris Murdoch was The Sandcastle published in 1957, recommended by my then English teacher who was concerned the O level syllabus did not really introduce us to writing about the world in which we lived.
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