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A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Martin is shocked when his wife announces that she wants a divorce because she is deeply in love with Palmer. Iris Murdoch has made a tightly-structured novel, using Martin as the first-person narrator. ![]() ![]() There are only a few characters – Martin, who is complacently happy with his mistress Georgie and his wife Antonia, Palmer who is Antonia’s analyst, Palmer’s half-sister, Honor, and Martin’s brother and sister Alexander and Rosemary. I felt I was looking into a different world and time. As I was reading it I thought it would make a good farce and then I discovered that Iris Murdoch had adapted her book for the stage. Recently I’ve read A Severed Head, first published in 1961 and have been wondering what to write about it without giving away too much of the plot. ![]() I’ve enjoyed several of her novels and biographies of her by John Bayley, Peter Conradi (an official biography)and A N Wilson (this last one was rather controversial). This last February was the tenth anniversary of Iris Murdoch’s death. ![]()
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