Under The Net (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)
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  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099429074
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $35.00

Under The Net (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Sep 2019
Paperback
5 Apr 2002
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Audiobook
7 Jul 2011
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The debut novel from one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century.

Iris Murdoch's first novel is set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a drifting, clever, likeable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging on his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him into a series of fantastic adventures. Jake is captivated by a majestic philosopher, Hugo Belfounder, whose profound and inconclusive reflections give the book its title - under the net of language.
  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099429074
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the author

Iris Murdoch

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.

Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net. Her twenty-six novels include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her philosophy includes Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); other philosophical writings, including 'The Sovereignty of Good' (1970), are collected in Existentialists and Mystics (1997).

portrait photo of Iris Murdoch

Also by Iris Murdoch

The Sea, The Sea & A Severed Head
Living on Paper
The Black Prince
The Bell (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)
An Accidental Man
A Word Child
The Time Of The Angels
See all

Praise for Under The Net (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Under the Net announces the emergence of a brilliant talent

Times Literary Supplement

Of all the novelists that have made their bow since the war she seems to me to be the most remarkable-behind her books one feels a power of intellect quite exceptional in a novelist

Sunday Times

This is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Immensely readable-Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever without any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply

Philip Toynbee

A dazzling story, light and comic in touch

The Times

Iris Murdoch has imposed her alternative world on us as surely as Christopher Columbus or Graham Greene

Sunday Times

Under the Net is a winner, a thoroughly accomplished first novel...Miss Murdoch's control of her material is completely assured. She is a distinguished novelist of a rare kind

Kingsley Amis, Spectator