Promotional Information

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.

About the Author

Iris Murdoch (Author)
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.

Sarah Perry (Introducer)
Sarah Perry is the internationally best-selling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews

She's writing about the only things that matter – love, goodness and how to be happy
*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
*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*

A tragi-comic masterpiece... A magnificent novel
*The Lady*

Her best book… Classic Murdoch tropes… are married to a spry and well-developed plot
*The Times*

The Bell is not frightening, precisely, but it offers that uneasy sensation of being suspended, somehow, between what is familiar and what is strange… a kind of hot, dreamlike muddle… The Bell has, in the 60 years since its publication, lost none of its power to disrupt
*Daily Telegraph*