UAL Lecturer reveals love affair with novelist
A lecturer at Chelsea College has revealed the details of his 30-year relationship with the late novelist Iris Murdoch for the first time.
David Morgan, in a new book With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch, describes falling in love with her when she was supervising his thesis at the Royal College in the mid-1960s.
They first kissed a fortnight after meeting, over an art book by Piero della Francesca, and began meeting regularly in a west London pub, supposedly for Murdoch to look over Morgan’s artwork.
"I only realised Iris Murdoch was in love with me by re-reading her letters,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Anne Rowe [Murdoch's official archivist] said something very astute: she said Iris Murdoch always had to be in love with somebody. I think I had that privilege in 1964 and 1965".
Despite the cooling-off of their love affair the pair maintained a close friendship for thirty years until Murdoch’s death in 1999, aged 79.
Murdoch scholars have suggested that Morgan was the inspiration for some of the characters in her novels from this period, a suggestion Morgan denies.
He said: “It's sweet of them but Anne Rowe's PhD students have gone on a Morgan hunt in the novels and found me in them when I'm sure I'm not. I wasn't that important”.
Murdoch wrote over twenty novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea, until she contracted Alzheimer’s in 1995.
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