Iris Murdoch is far more well known as a novelist, philosopher, and literary critic than as a playwright; her reputation and significance in twentieth-century literature rests largely on her twenty-six novels rather than her drama. Though she has written only five fully staged plays, three of which were adapted from her prose fiction, she was nevertheless in the 1950s one of a small group of women playwrights whose dramatic work was produced on the London stage and achieved popular and critical success. Murdoch's novels are written in a realist style and depict an intellectual middle-class milieu in which complex narratives portray bizarre and carefully observed social and sexual relationships within an eccentric macabre world. Developing from Murdoch's emphasis on strong characterization and elaborate plotting, her plays explore a grotesque and comic world inhabited by self-obsessed and spiritually bankrupt people in need of transformation and moral regeneration. Murdoch's writing...