Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?' Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.

In a BBC Radio 4 discussion of Murdoch and her work in 2009 Wilson assented to Bidisha's view that Murdoch's philosophical output consisted of nothing but "GCSE-style" essays on Plato and even suggested that Murdoch's later philosophical work "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" was a mistake that precipitated Murdoch into Alzheimers. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause Iris Murdoch had given earlier in The Red and the Green and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978. N.

Her first publiIris Murdochd novel Under the Net was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987 Iris Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.