These two major novels—by one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century—are ferociously dark comedies that combine playfulness with profundity. A Severed Head  (1961) is one of Iris Murdoch’s most entertaining works, tracing the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, prosperous London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. The story takes bedroom farce to a new level of sophistication, with scenes that are both wickedly funny and emblematic of the way momentous moral issues play out in everyday life.   The Booker Prize–winning The Sea, the Sea  (1978) is set on the edge of England’s North Sea, where egotistical Charles Arrowby, a big name in London’s glittering theatrical world, has retreated into seclusion to write his memoirs. Arrowby’s plans begin to unravel when he encounters his long-lost first love and finds himself increasingly besieged by his own fantasies, delusions, and obsessions.             Both novels are tragicomic masterpieces that brilliantly dramatize how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves and by the all-consuming need for love, meaning, and redemption. Introduction by Sarah Churchwell Praise for The Sea, the Sea   “Dazzlingly entertaining and inventive.” —THE TIMES (London)    “One of Miss Murdoch’s best novels . . . Murdoch was always balancing the demands of storytelling with the more urgent need to examine how the truth of a fleeting life reflected the larger, permanent truths of existence.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES   “Murdoch’s subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the twentieth century.” —THE GUARDIAN   Praise for A Severed Head   “Beautifully and wittily written.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES   “This is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement.” — Elizabeth Jane Howard   “Remarkable . . .  One feels a power of intellect quite exceptional in a novelist.” —THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)    “Murdoch’s novels are not merely cerebral exercises in ideas about moral philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, although those ideas shape her fiction. They are also shot through with the dark energies of occult forces, variously figured as Eros, the id, the unconscious, the repressed, the monstrous, the supernatural, the libidinous . . . Murdoch’s fictional experiments . . . fuse realism with the mystical.” —from the Introduction by Sarah Churchwell IRIS MURDOCH (1919-1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy Fellow at St Anne's College for twenty years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than twenty-six novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry. SARAH CHURCHWELL  is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of  The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe  and  Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby . She writes regularly for  New Statesman, The Guardian,  and  The Times Literary Supplement,  among other publications. INTRODUCTION In Iris Murdoch’s 1973 novel The Black Prince , a popular writer named Arnold Baffin defends his regular production of books he knows are not as good as he’d like them to be: ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.’ Character here presumably speaks for author, although one also suspects that poor silly Arnold Baffin’s platonic conception of a perfect idea is probably less perfect than he thinks. It’s a good bet that Iris Murdoch’s perfect ideas were better. A published philosopher whose first book was the first book in English on Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch wrote novels of ideas about love, as well as the occasional love letter to ideas. Obsession is everywhere in her fictional landscape, but characters are as likely to be obsessed with art as with sex. Adulteration is the game: nothing remains pure, certainly not fidelity to other people, or to social conventions, even the most deeply held. Her characters are most faithful to their conceptions of themselves, which are almost never shared by those around them. In her essay ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, Murdoch wrote that the most important thing for a novel to reveal, ‘not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist’. It was a point she made repeatedly outside her fiction: ‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,’ as she wrote in ‘On ‘‘God’’ and ‘‘Good’’ ’. Alt