Dr. Miles Leeson was clearing out 30 Charlbury Road in Oxford when he noticed something strange about a large bookcase in the attic. Sliding it aside revealed a hidden door leading into a dusty inner sanctum.
What the director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre found inside changes our entire understanding of one of Britain's most formidable novelists. Resting in the secret room were more than 80 unknown paintings and sketches created by Murdoch herself.
The Myth of the Writer vs. The Secret Painter
For decades, scholars believed Iris Murdoch only painted three works in her entire life. She was a Booker Prize winner and a fierce philosopher, known for her dense, sprawling novels about morality and human failure. Visual art was thought to be something she admired from a distance.
This discovery shatters that assumption. According to the discovery team, the stash dates back to the early days of the Second World War when Murdoch was still an undergraduate student at Oxford. The collection includes her only known self-portrait, painted in January 1941, offering a stark look at how the 21-year-old saw herself before she became a literary titan.
Surrealism and Early Experiments
The contents of the hidden studio suggest a fierce, private experimentation that she kept entirely separate from her public intellectual life. Among the cache were four surrealist landscapes and three pencil sketches of female nudes.
Dr. Leeson noted that the sketches carry a distinct sexual energy, reflecting her early fascination with the human form and hinting at the complex private life and bisexuality she would later explore in her writing. Fans of classic surrealism wall art will recognize the distinct influence of the era in her strange, dreamlike landscapes.
From the Attic to the Gallery
The timing of the discovery, following the 2024 passing of Audi Bayley (the second wife of Murdoch's late husband John Bayley), means these private experiments are finally seeing the light. This is not even the first time the Oxford attic has yielded secrets; a chest of unpublished poetry was recovered there in 2016.
Now, the visual artworks have made their public debut. The retrospective Iris Murdoch amongst the Artists opened on August 14, 2026, at the University of Chichester's Bishop Otter campus, placing her hidden canvases alongside works by British artists she influenced.
Murdoch spent her career investigating the messy truth of other people's lives in her novels. But behind a sliding bookcase, she spent her youth quietly observing herself.
0 comments