Abstract

Anne Rowe, one of Iris Murdoch’s foremost literary critics, has not only published widely on Murdoch’s work—editing three previous Palgrave collections, and Murdoch’s letters with Avril Horner—but also taught Murdoch at undergraduate and postgraduate level for over twenty-five years. Rooted in this teaching experience she returns in Chap. 4, ‘“A Man Shut in A Glass”: Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net’, to Murdoch’s first novel to grapple with the knotty issue of how this novel is being read by twenty-first century readers in the light of contemporary feminism and the #metoo movement. At the time of publication, Jake Donaghue was viewed as a Kingsley Amis-style ‘lad’, but after the Harvey Weinstein furore his behaviour appears far less innocent. As does Hugo Belfounder’s: once seen as an early figure of good in Murdoch’s oeuvre, he can now be read as a dangerous sexual predator (even uncannily like Weinstein in appearance). Rowe persuasively demonstrates the protean nature of Murdoch’s novels which are read very differently in the twenty-first century but remain relevant and presciently insightful, engaging a new generation of readers. Taking into account the development of Intersectional Feminism, Rowe argues that Murdoch’s fiction holds up a mirror to its times, indirectly—and humorously—disclosing attitudes of men towards women in ways that subtly identify and critique behaviours which are now being directly challenged. This essay thus enacts within itself Rowe’s opening contention that ‘critical interrogation of literary texts is necessarily influenced by both political and cultural movements in society and fresh developments in literary theory’ (47), as it offers a new reading of Under the Net, appropriate for today’s feminist agenda.