The Bell

"The Bell is recognized as her first major landmark. I think you can look at the first six or seven novels of her career, from Under the Net up to maybe An Unofficial Rose , where she’s playing with form and genre—just experimenting, really. Trying to find out what form of novel suits her temperament and her writing style. I think beyond Unofficial Rose , she’s very much found her niche and her style. The characteristics of that style is that she writes primarily two types of novels. She writes closed novels, which focus on a small community or a household or a particular location. The Bell and The Black Prince would certainly be two closed novels, while A Word Child and Philosopher’s Pupil would be two open novels. An open novel would have a much wider range of characters; in the line of Dickens or perhaps Dostoyevsky , it features large numbers of characters dealing with major themes I outlined earlier such as what it means to be free, the fallings in and out of love that Murdoch’s novels are so well renowned for, difficulties with families or with the perception of each other as individuals, grief. Those would be some of her major themes for her fiction. She claimed that The Bell was her lucky novel. There were three novels prior to that. The first two, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), were very much dealing with issues that came out of her interest and then later difficulties with the post-Second World War existentialist movement and her own life living in London during the Second World War . So they’re very much influenced by continental writers like Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Samuel Beckett . The Sandcastle (1957), her third novel, has been thought of as middlebrow female writing. It was seen as kind of a genre romance work, although that view has changed now. “It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel” The Bell was very well received. In the first year it sold over 30,000 copies, which was far more than any of her novels had ever sold before. It’s very well developed around a small community within Imber court and it focuses on the experiences of Dora Greenfield, a young woman of 21, who’s married a completely unsuitable man called Paul . Paul has gone off to this quasi-religious community which is attached to the religious community of the abbey, to undertake historical work relating to documentation. And he invites Dora, who is at that point in London, down to be with him. It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel, which takes a lot from Austen: “Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.” And from that moment, we’re drawn into the novel. We want to know what’s going on with Dora. It has all the elements of a bildungsroman. Dora very much develops and works her way through the book, and in the end, ends up leaving Paul and having a life of her own. She’s going off to fulfill her vocation as a teacher. There are various characters along the way; certainly those that she meets when she gets to Imber, who influence her journey and her thoughts on life. And also her experience with nature, and with art as well, those are certainly important factors within the novel."