A Severed Head

A Severed Head

by Miranda Seymour (Introduction), Miranda Seymour (Introduction), Miranda Seymour (Introduction), Iris Murdoch (Author), Iris Murdoch (Author)

Synopsis

Martin Lynch-Gibbon believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, 'this is nothing to do with happiness'.

$12.23

Quantity

7 in stock

More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published:

ISBN 10: 0099285363
ISBN 13: 9780099285366
Book Overview: A complicated and comic story of dangerous love affairs

Media Reviews
This is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement -- Elizabeth Jane Howard
Of all the novelists that have made their bow since the war she seems to me to be the most remarkable...behind her books one feels a power of intellect quite exceptional in a novelist * Sunday Times *
Immensely readable...Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever without any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply -- Philip Toynbee
Author Bio
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. Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net. Her twenty-six novels include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her philosophy includes Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); other philosophical writings, including The Sovereignty of Good (1970), are collected in Existentialists and Mystics (1997).