'This new overview of Murdoch's life, coming as it does in her centenary year, brings together fresh materials on her life and work and will be a central resource for students, teachers, academics and the general reader. Rowe builds on her vast knowledge of Murdoch – and her earlier published work – to bring out the fullest examination of Murdoch's life and work to date. This is a book by an academic at the height of her powers'. Dr Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester ‘The leading Murdoch scholar Anne Rowe, in an effective new critical study, emphasises the relevance to Murdoch’s future reputation of society’s increasing openness to “more complex variations in sexual and psychological make-up”. The old myth that Murdoch only writes about leisured middle-class heterosexuals who live in big houses has in turn bred the more recent myth that nobody could possibly bother reading her nowadays...’ Leo Robson, The New Statesman