It was a famous literary partnership. He rose to become Warton Professor of English, published Romantic Survival, The Characters Of Love and books on Tolstoy and Pushkin. He is also a novelist and an energetic reviewer. Marriage made it easier for Iris to write, because all the events of her imagination were free and tumultuous, whereas her ordinary daily life could now be calmer. They toured the world, often for the British Council, giving joint lectures. There was a big rambling house in Steeple Aston, succeeded from 1989 by a Betjeman villa in north Oxford, but in a don-free area, quiet and easy for shopping. She sewed like mad, and wore plimsolls to ease the pressure of arthritis, not least when she went to the Palace to collect her DBE. Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away.” One of these early works featured a “bogus scholar” and may have been instigated by Iris Murdoch’s own doubts about her intellectual stature. In 1947, when she took up the offer of a postgraduate scholarship to study Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, she told Raymond Queneau that she had “started writing the novel about the Bogus scholar and the Archaic Goddess which has been in my head so long”. However, she later abandoned the novel, and confided to him her suspicion that what she had produced was “worthless”. Modern Library ranked Under the Net at #95 on its list of ‘ the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.’ Under The Net Analysis

I put aside the book I was reading and rang for Jeeves. As he shimmied into existence beside me, I gave him a scathing look: I wanted him to know I was miffed. In Paris, Jake is amazed to discover that Jean-Pierre Breteuil's latest novel, Nous les Vainqueurs, has won the Prix Goncourt, and having dismissed Breteuil's work for so long he is amazed and envious. Madge's offer turns out to be a kind of film industry sinecure, and he finds himself refusing it with distaste for reasons that he cannot explain. Money isn't a great priority for him -- and he manages to scrape by, even though he seems terminally short of cash. Oh, no, sir," the man was all apologies immediately. "Such behaviour is furthest from my mind, I assure you." What was she like? There are myths here, as well as truths. She created, in Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), one character who feared that after his death he would be wrongly praised as a saint, and seems to have meant this as a whimsical warning about being turned into the Abbess of north Oxford herself. Yet she would answer all fan-mail by hand, with no help from a secretary, who - this was her fear - would eat up further time. As a result she was plagued by bores who returned for more. ‘Pals for life’ she once despairingly complained. There were often 12 letters per day, and then 200 at Christmas. She helped her mother’s window-cleaner publish a detective novel. When A S Byatt’s son was killed, Iris listened to her and wept, and let her say the things that no-one else would.Such a process of learning is necessarily a calling-into-question of what is normally meant by ‘identity’. Indeed, she would often speak of herself as having no strong identity. And yet the capacity so to forget herself depended equally on an unusually strong sense of who she was. In the bar of a train in 1981, an enthusiastic lady greeted Iris Murdoch as Margaret Drabble. ‘How can you tell,’ Iris quizzically and patiently enquired ‘that I’m not Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark?’ ‘I’d know you anywhere Margaret,’ cried the enthusiast. It so happens that Hugo was a former friend of Jake's. They had met long ago as fellow participants in a cold-cure experiment, and had had long philosophical discussions which Jake, without Hugo's knowledge, had turned into a book called The Silencer. Because Hugo believed that language was corrupt, Jake felt that creation of the book was a kind of betrayal, and had unilaterally broken off the friendship after its publication, not wishing to face Hugo's anger. Communication, he feels, is practically impossible: "The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods".

Jake’s quest next leads him to his friend Dave’s house. Dave Gellman is a philosopher, “a real one,” with whom Jake loves to discuss ideas. Yet no matter how much they talk, he finds that they never get anywhere. Jake tries to discuss various philosophical concepts from Hegel or Spinoza, which he did not fully understand. Dave often tells him that he does not understand Jake. “It took me some time,” Jake said “to realize that when Dave said he didn’t understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.” This reflects Wittgenstein’s belief that all philosophers, including himself, could at best only write nonsense, because of the limitation of language. Jake finally gives up trying to talk philosophy with him, because “Dave could never get past the word.” The author’s day job was as a professor at Oxford so all her novels have concepts from philosophy or philosophy of life themes worked into them. Two are evident in this story. One is political, based around a socialist political activist appropriately named ‘Lefty.’ He corners Jake in a bar. They are both socialists but Jake doesn’t give a rap about politics, so Lefty engages him in a Socratic dialog to run him through the paces: Is it that you don’t care or is it that you feel it’s hopeless to try to do anything? Well, Jake tells him, it’s a bit of both and they’re interconnected aren’t they? The influence was literary as well as moral. ‘He was a very literary man, he loved books and tales. I could read at an early age. He wanted to discuss books with me, so I was reading Treasure Island, Kim and the Alice stories. These were the first books I remember enjoying, and I discussed them with my father.’ Today: Jacques Derrida, a Frenchman whose philosophical essays have inspired and influenced literary criticism all over the world, espouses deconstruction and postmodern theories. She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her. I count myself among the many who hope to have been taught by her, and who will miss her terribly.

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Murdoch often dealt with everyday conflicts and household problems in her books, and Under the Net is no exception. She was known for her perfectionism to writing and not allowing editors to change her work.

Iris Murdoch was never a student of Wittgenstein, but she did once meet him, and befriended Wittgenstein’s star pupil, Yorich Smythies. It is likely that she based Hugo’s character on Yorich Smythies. To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world, [and thus] this form is arbitrary.”

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Had the war not supervened, Iris might have continued her studies as a Renaissance art historian. With her first degree she got a post in Cambridge for a year and then in Oxford, where she taught philosophy from 1948 to 1963. She is remembered as a generous and brilliant teacher - very beautiful, with great big eyes and striking dresses. There was a brief period teaching philosophy at the Royal College of Art in the 1963-67. She found the wildness of the students picturesque, and this gets into the novels of that decade. Sadie leads Jake to another old acquaintance: Hugo Belfounder, a curious and very talented soul who dabbled (successfully) in a variety of undertakings. In 1952 John Bayley, a humble junior instructor, saw Iris from his Oxford window pedalling past on her bicycle, and fell in love with her at first sight. Even from a distance, he insists, he could tell that she was ‘mature, sensible, mysterious and humorous’. Two weeks later they met at a party, found they both lived in the same street, and bicycled home together. They married in 1956. She cooked for the first fortnight, not well, then he took over. Miss Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, reveals a brilliant talent. (...) Set against this dazzling array of virtues, the weaknesses of Under the Net pale into their proper significance. They are faults of construction and design." - Times Literary Supplement

Setting always plays a large role in Murdoch’s novels. Under the Net is no exception. Throughout the story, readers are aware that the characters are either in London or Paris, as Murdoch provides the precise names of streets. Jake even criticizes different parts of the city, stating that he prefers certain neighborhoods or sections of the city to others. The names of actual rivers and bridges, as well as the names of pubs, are often mentioned.

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Tournament video footage of the S-serve is hard to find, but here’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvldP5KCobw>one example where both Existentialism, as espoused by Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, is developed in France by Jean-Paul Sartre through his essays and novels. Hidden Depths: For several characters. Jake regularly shortchanges them and is surprised to find out that this trope applies to them.