Iris Murdoch's new novel, "Nuns and Soldiers," is an epitome and sum of its 19 predecessors. It provides us, therefore, with an opportunity to formulate some constants among this round score of fictions and to see what they add up to. The first of her novels, "Under the Net" (1954), won her immediate acclaim as one of the Angry Young Men—a confusion of sexes that anticipates a number of her characters. Since then, critics, as usual, have disagreed about what is good and what bad in her work. But they have agreed above all else to take Iris Murdoch seriously, to take her as among "the most accomplished British novelists to come to maturity since the close of World War II," to quote one of her critics. (p. 1)

Iris Murdoch has had a number of genuine, if modest, popular successes. I think I know why.

On the one hand...