0
    • Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
    0 0
    Download high-resolution image Look inside

    A Severed Head

    Author Iris Murdoch
    Look inside
    Paperback
    $16.00 US
    Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
    On sale Nov 18, 1976 | 208 Pages | 9780140020038
    Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

    See Additional Formats
    A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea

    Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.”

    A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.
    Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry. View titles by Iris Murdoch
    Praise for Iris Murdoch and A Severed Head:

    “Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine.  She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

    “One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." —The Millions 

    “Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty.” —Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times

    “In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world.  I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me.” —Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement

    “Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts.” —Walter Allen, The New York Times 

    “The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement.” —Elizabeth Jane Howard

    “Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply.” —Philip Toynbee

    About

    A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea

    Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.”

    A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.

    Author

    Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry. View titles by Iris Murdoch

    Praise

    Praise for Iris Murdoch and A Severed Head:

    “Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine.  She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

    “One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." —The Millions 

    “Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty.” —Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times

    “In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world.  I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me.” —Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement

    “Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts.” —Walter Allen, The New York Times 

    “The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement.” —Elizabeth Jane Howard

    “Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply.” —Philip Toynbee

    Additional formats

    Other Books by this Author

    Related Articles

    Subscribe

    Penguin Random House Higher Education

    © 2026 Penguin Random House

    Back to Top
    0
    Wish List (0)