Issyvoo

Because her imaginative world is so idiosyncratic, so easily recognizable, she is open to the charge of repetition, even of self-parody, but the accusation will not stick in any serious sense, for those aspects which are very similar to one another are the least significant.

Like Henry James’s, Iris Murdoch’s style is high, in the sense that she writes about lofty matters—the nature of morality, the reasons for existence, how we should live and love, how we should die—as they arise in stories about the upper middle classes, stories about people who have the leisure, education, civilisation, plausibly to think and speak about these lofty matters in a suitably lofty way, stories about people who live at a level of society supposed, for the sake of the convention, to be above the distracting contingencies of everyday life.