How Iris Murdoch Opened a Young Woman's View of Life

I recently published a short post on why people read fiction and here is another on the same theme.

Susan Scarf Merrell, a novelist and creative writing instructor, has a recent piece in the New York Times in which she relates how discovering the works of Iris Murdoch at a young age opened her eyes to a different world than that in which she was being brought up.

Merrell relates how she grew up in a literary family where books were everywhere, passed around from one person to another and discussed at dinner, in the car or on walks. These included works by authors such as Dickens, Austin, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, George Eliot -- you get the picture.

Iris Murdock was not in the family canon. And despite being a contemporary author who had, at the time Merrell discovered her work by chance in the closet of a vacation house in Sicily, written about half of the 26 novels she would eventually publish, was never mentioned in the Merrell household.

For the young woman -- and this is no doubt a story familiar to many -- Murdock's novels opened a new world of possibilities. Life could be considerably, and excitingly, different from what Merrell up to that point had imagined.

"Her people voiced prejudice, held misguided opinions, and Murdoch took them down, but with understanding and affection.  Marriages ended, things were said, there was way too much drinking and even some fighting, and life went on. Yes, in Murdoch's world characters behaved badly and were not always punished for it.  And even if they were, they found their way to reasonable fates."

And, of course, there was all the sex: "hetero- and homo-, extramarital, even incestuous, all charged with violence, betrayal and yearning -- utterly thrilling to an overly protected kid like me."

Did Merrell then share or discuss these works with other members of her family?  She did not, clearly feeling they were not part of that world.

"I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional works of one's own."