A Severed Head
by Iris Murdoch
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At a glance:
- Author: Iris Murdoch
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: The early 1960’s
- Setting: London, Cambridge, and Oxford
- Characters: Martin Lynch-Gibbon, Antonia, Georgie Hands, Alexander, Palmer Anderson, Honor Klein
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Satire, Farce, Fiction of manners, Novel
- Subjects: 1950's, 1960's, Self-discovery, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Marriage, Betrayal, Friendship, Incest, Obsession, England or English people, Reality, Alcohol, Adultery, London, Naivete, Fog
- Locales: Europe, London, England, Cambridge, England, Oxford, England, United Kingdom
The Novel
Martin Lynch-Gibbon tells this story, he informs the reader, because it is about his loss of “great peace,” “the end of the old innocent world,” and about how he “was plunged into the nightmare” his life has become. An essential part of his peace is his relationship with Georgie Hands, his lover of two years. Even though she had become pregnant with his child and had had an abortion, this did nothing to disrupt his sense of peace and tranquillity, for—because she had dealt with the abortion alone, an illustration, he thinks, of her “toughness, and the...
(The entire page is 3678 words.)
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