A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea
Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.”
A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.
"One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." —The Millions
"Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty." —Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times
"Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts." —Walter Allen, The New York Times
“The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement.” —Elizabeth Jane Howard
“Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply.” —Philip Toynbee
A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea
Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.”
A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.
Praise
"One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." —The Millions
"Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty." —Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times
"Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts." —Walter Allen, The New York Times
“The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement.” —Elizabeth Jane Howard
“Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply.” —Philip Toynbee
