It made no sense for me to read Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. I found the title to be offensive, and the first line of the book revealed that it involved an extramarital affair. My exam was only a few weeks away—I should have been studying intensely. A slender justification was that Iris was the wife of my supervisor John Bayley, and I thought the book might be set in Oxford. A passage at the end of the first chapter stayed with me:
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“Being So Utterly Private”
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It made no sense for me to read Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. I found the title to be offensive, and the first line of the book revealed that it involved an extramarital affair. My exam was only a few weeks away—I should have been studying intensely. A slender justification was that Iris was the wife of my supervisor John Bayley, and I thought the book might be set in Oxford. A passage at the end of the first chapter stayed with me: