The Hidden Room of Iris Murdoch

Behind a large bookcase in the attic of a house in North Oxford there was a door that almost no one knew existed. Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, says access to it was so difficult that probably no one had set foot in the room for decades. Perhaps no one but Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley knew what lay behind that bookcase.

When the door was opened, more than eighty works of art came out. According to published reports, they include surrealist paintings, watercolours, drawings of the female nude, portraits of Murdoch's parents, two sketchbooks, and a self-portrait dated 7 January 1941.

A twenty-one-year-old woman looking at herself.

That woman was Iris Murdoch. The same woman who would go on to write twenty-six novels, win the Booker Prize in 1978 with The Sea, The Sea, and become one of the most important voices in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Until this discovery, only three paintings by her were known. In a single day the number rose from three to more than eighty.

This is not the first thing that attic has given up. In 2016, in a trunk in the main part of the same attic, Leeson found some six hundred unpublished poems. Murdoch had been writing poetry since the age of seventeen, revising it again and again, and published almost none of it. She feared it was mediocre. A selection appeared last year, and the reception was not uniform; one reviewer wrote that the poems would have been better left in the attic.

Most of the paintings belong to the years 1939 to 1941. Europe had entered the war and Murdoch was a student at Oxford. She had written neither a novel nor a book of philosophy.

But today, knowing how the story ends, these paintings raise an unavoidable question.

Murdoch built much of her moral philosophy on a problem that looks simple: how do we see? For her, morality was not formed at the moment of choice. Before we choose, we have already seen something, and what we have seen has determined what seems possible to us at all. But what we see is not all that stands before us. Envy, fear, pride and the picture we have made of ourselves come between our eyes and reality. Sometimes we do not see a person; we see the image we have made of them. For the effort in the opposite direction, Murdoch borrowed the word attention from Simone Weil: a stepping back of the self, so that the other may have room to be seen.

And painting, in its simplest form, is a practice of exactly that. A painter cannot glance once and carry on from what he assumes he knows. The eye must return again and again from the paper to the subject, and what was assumed is corrected each time.

It cannot be said with any certainty that this experience later found its way into her philosophy. But it is difficult to ignore that before Murdoch wrote about the difficulty of seeing, she had put herself through one of the oldest exercises in seeing there is. More than fifty works from the collection have still not been seen.

The real question, though, lies elsewhere: why did she never show them?

Murdoch kept things: poems, letters, notebooks, paintings. But keeping something is not the same as hiding it. Her poems she at least sometimes sent to those close to her. The paintings she sent to no one. They stayed for decades behind that bookcase, in a room whose existence her closest companions did not know of.

And among them is a self-portrait. A woman who would later write about the need for the self to step aside if reality is to be seen, sitting at twenty-one in front of herself, trying to see her own face.

Twenty-five works from the collection, including that self-portrait, are on display until 10 December at the University of Chichester Library, in the exhibition Iris Murdoch Amongst the Artists. It is the first exhibition to present Murdoch as a visual artist.

Before Iris Murdoch wrote about how we see, what did she see?

Source: The Guardian, 14 August 2026