Influences and Inspirations: Iris Murdoch, Janet Frame and Susan Howatch
In the Iris Murdoch Review No. 13, 2022, Daniel Read notes that ‘Murdoch’s writings are important for a great many other creative individuals, including actors, comedians and writers’ (p.144). Of course, finding all connections is an impossible mission, but to the long list of writers known to be influenced by Murdoch I want to add the names of Janet Frame and Susan Howatch. Janet Frame (1924–2004) is a great writer from Dunedin, New Zealand; Susan Howatch (1940) is a famous British bestselling author.
In this article I will describe the facts of Murdoch’s influence on Frame and Howatch; then I will discuss similarities and differences in their work and argue that reading Frame and Howatch suggests a critical question regarding Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a question that also relates to the ‘resolute reading’ of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals offered by Laverty and Mylonaki, the topic of a previous blogpost.
Murdoch’s Influence on Frame
While a patient in Seacliff, a mental hospital near Oamaru, New Zealand, Janet Frame won the Hubert Church Memorial award for prose for The Lagoon and Other Stories. The collection of short stories was published in March 1952, but it was the news of the award in December of that year that saved her from the leucotomy for which she had been selected, since ECT and insulin treatments were found unsuccessful. From 1956 till 1963 Frame lived and worked in Europe, mostly in London. Her painful anxieties made her look for help again, which she finally found in the Maudsley Hospital in the person of Dr R.H. Cawley. Looking back on the London years, Frame writes in 1984 in her autobiography:
I had absorbed much from living in London … I read the Beat Poets of City Light Press; Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath (recently dead); William Golding; Samuel Selvon; Iris Murdoch, Albert Camus, Sartre, Duras, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet … Well, my London days were full of experience – museums, galleries, libraries, people; and underlying all was a gradual strengthening of me in my place through my talks with Dr Cawley as if he was a bespoke tailor helping to reinforce the seams of my life and now I was putting on my own garment to try it. (1)
Here, Frame mentions prominent contemporary poets and novelists, and Murdoch is just one name on the list. Unbeknown to her, Murdoch played yet another role in her life. Dr Cawley soon realised that Frame was unlike most patients and he came to disagree with the New Zealand doctors’ diagnosis of schizophrenia. The conversations with her told him that Frame had an intense need to write and her work showed her talent for it. He believed that some sort of autobiography might help her, but he wanted advice and for that he turned to Murdoch. Frame’s biographer Michael King reports what happened:
So enthused was Cawley about this idea, as a means by which his star patient could finally clear away all misunderstandings about her 'illness' and generate more substantial income, that he wrote for advice to Iris Murdoch, a friend of a friend. Murdoch replied cautiously: ‘Much would depend on how long the case history section was and how it cohered with the rest… [Any] publisher might take it … if it was vivid enough… I wish Miss Frame luck’. (2)
Maybe Murdoch’s reply reassured Cawley, anyway, he encouraged Frame to take her writing seriously and see herself as a writer. In 1961 Faces in the Water was published, a novel inspired by her life in mental hospitals but definitely more creative fiction than autobiographic documentary. Over the years, Frame and Cawley kept in touch. Frame dedicated seven of her novels to Cawley; Cawley thanked Frame most graciously for her ‘contribution to the education of a psychiatrist’ in the Festschrift for her 70th birthday. (3)
A third link between Frame and Murdoch is a somewhat ambivalent observation by C.K. Stead. In the early 1950s Karl Stead became friends with Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson, the already established writer who offered Frame the much needed ‘room of one’s own’. Later, in London, Stead visited Frame in the Maudsley and reported back to Sargeson. By then Stead was on his way to a successful career in literary theory and literary criticism; in 1964 his study on Yeats, Pound and Eliot, The New Poetic, was very well received. In a letter to Sargeson in 1965 Stead mentions that he had met Iris Murdoch. He reports as follows:
I(ris) M(urdoch) reminded me in some ways of Janet, though on the surface far more formidable and commanding. But I detected the same disbelief in the world around her, the same dislike of being the subject of attention and dislike of not being it, the same apparent diffidence covering an enormous self-consuming ego. (4)
The friendship between Stead and Frame dwindled over the years. One reason is that Stead found it hard to forgive Frame for publishing The Triumph of Poetry, a short story about a young man who dreams of being of poet but actually becomes an academic. It was obvious to him and to others that the story derided his life. (5)
Frame’s extraordinary trajectory of being a writer is beautifully dramatised by Jane Campion in the film An Angel at My Table in 1990. However, Frame’s exceptional history, her autobiographical work, and perhaps the film too, contributed to interpretations of her literary work as reflections on psychiatric change from mental illness to health. Yet, this reading does not hold. Not only because, as Cawley concluded, Frame never was a schizophrenic, but also because it misunderstands the central theme of her work. Frame’s novels and poetry do focus on inner change, but the change involves turning away from ordinary language, from established ‘seeing as’ and literal meanings, and turning towards a new language and a new world. Her work is about death of conventional realism and resurrection of poetic realism, and in some novels she uses psychiatry as a vehicle to create this transformation. Delrez writes that ‘Frame’s concern with aesthetics – indeed, her determination to move beyond a strictly realistic scheme of representation – accounts for her long-standing interest in the theme of the creative artist which … lend[s the novels] a self-reflexive dimension’. (6)
Murdoch’s Influence on Howatch
Susan Howatch’s work can be divided into two phases. Her early work, published when she lived in USA, consists of family sagas loosely based on history. In 1980 she returned to England and settled in Salisbury, not far from the cathedral. Its presence changed her life; it urged her to reflect and opened the way to a Christian lifestyle. Later she moved to London, where she found a place near Westminster Abbey and started to attend evensong every day. Her conversion affected her writing. (7) Her later work, the ‘Starbridge Series’ 1987–94 and the ‘St Benet’s Trilogy’ 1997–2004 tell stories of people on their spiritual journeys, in particular Christian spirituality connected with the Church of England. At the moment she lives in Leatherhead, her place of birth. In 2025 a new version of Glamorous Powers, the second novel of the ‘Starbridge Series’ was published.
Howatch explicitly mentions Murdoch as an important influence. The first volume of the ‘St Benet’s Trilogy’, entitled The Wonder Worker in the American edition and A Question of Integrity in the British edition, includes an interview with the author. Asked about the strongest literary influences, Howatch answers: ‘Trollope. Iris Murdoch. Graham Greene. Raymond Chandler. Not C.S. Lewis’. Again, in The High Flyer, the second volume published in 1999, Howatch says ‘I am also a great fan of the British novelist Iris Murdoch who died recently. The big three would be Collins, Chandler and Murdoch, in terms of influence’.
There is a further reference to Murdoch in The Wonder Worker. When Lewis Hall, a priest of St Benet’s is in hospital, his colleague Nicholas visits him and brings books: ‘Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time … and Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood, which also just appeared in paperback … the Murdoch novel I shall no doubt enjoy’. (8) Well, it does sound as if Howatch is talking about her personal library.
Howatch does not elaborate on Murdoch’s influence, yet there are similarities. A minor similarity is that London is almost a character in the ‘St Benet’s Trilogy’, a ‘vibrant and personified backdrop to the action’ as Howatch puts it, very much like London in Murdoch’s novels. For example, when Carter Graham, the protagonist of The High Flyer, runs away from her apartment in the Barbican to the vicarage of St Benet’s near Fleetside, the route symbolises her leaving the world of power and profiteering to enter the world of prayer, healing, Christ and God. This passage also alludes to the major similarity between Howatch and Murdoch. In her novels, Howatch describes the spiritual journey, such as Carter’s, as a journey from a false, fragmented self to a true, integrated self. The picture clearly resembles Murdoch’s vision of moral change and moral pilgrimage. In the words of Anne Bancroft:
…from the way her [Susan Howatch’s] novels are targeted to reveal the split between who you think you are and who you really are, we can see that for her there is an ideal of a delusion-free person (just as Iris Murdoch’s ideal was the selfless person), one who has dropped all the armour of the glittering image and lives entirely from the true self, the true human beneath the delusion, and who is thus totally aligned with what Susan calls God, and Taoists call might call the Way. (9)
A Common Theme: Inner Change
Murdoch’s conception of moral change is well known to readers and scholars alike. Throughout her philosophical essays and her novels, Murdoch highlights the question of becoming morally better. She conceives of moral progress as a moral change from selfishness to just love and respect for the other in the light of the Good. Moral change is a process of ‘transformation of energy’, ‘redeployment of energy’, ‘conversion’, ‘change of being’, breaking the barrier which ‘divides the area of our interests and requirements from the rest of the world’, ‘metanoia’ – to mention some of Murdoch’s expressions. (10)
Frances White argues that in Murdoch’s novels metanoia usually involves remorse and repentance. Thus remorse is a crucial phase in the process of becoming morally better:
Remorse shocks her characters into a new attention to the reality of others and thereby forces them into a degree of unselfing. It breaks open the ego. Remorse enables them to perceive evil, and – by antithetical extension – the Good and to realise their distance from it … Murdoch … reveals remorse … as a moral index: it tests the capacity of her characters for unselfing, for attention, for love. And, uncomfortably, it tests those capacities in her reader too. Apprehension of the crucial role of remorse in human life is central to Murdoch’s moral vision and art. (11)
According to White, remorse plays a critical role in all but two of Murdoch’s novels. Murdoch was well aware of the dramatic force of remorse. She notes that although moral change can happen through gradual education or continuous orientation to good habits, itis often staged big in literature: ‘Literature tends to be more interested in dramatic moral change than in good habits … because it is pleasant to fantasize a rapid easy escape and a miraculous removal of the burden of thickened egoism.’ (12) Murdoch definitely foregrounds the drama in her novels, leaving only a minor role for the unwavering virtuous person, as White shows.
In Howatch’s novels, the turning of the soul certainly structures the narrative too. The opening of The Wonder Worker introduces the theme as follows:
I can remember exactly when the miracles began. It was when I first met Nicholas Darrow and fell in love with him. Can I write that and avoid sounding like a romantic schoolgirl? No … So let me reject any statement which reeks of romance and write instead: I can remember exactly when my life began to change out of all recognition. It was when I first saw Nicholas Darrow and glimpsed a life-style I had never encountered before. That’s better. That’s more truthful, and truth matters. I suppose in the end it’s all a question of integrity. (13)
Howatch describes the inner crisis and healing process in psychological and religious terms. For her, the two languages of psychology and religion can be regarded as complementary paths to the truth, and the ministry of healing can go hand in hand with psychotherapy. (14) She does, however, believe that God is the absolute reality and the source of love for human beings. For Howatch, ‘it is God who converts people, not novelists, just as it is God who heals people, not healers’. (15) Thus, relating to God and accepting God’s love as a guide for life is essential to the inner change from brokenness to integrity.
Frame thematises an aesthetic metanoia. For her, the soul’s change depends on a transformation of sensory perceptions and language, away from the conventional toward the imaginative and poetical. According to Delrez, Frame stages ‘overtly both the cancellation of experience in daily living and the compensatory retrieval in act of (re-)creation’ … so that both writer and reader have to ‘struggle to visualize elusive expanses / expansions of being'. (16) Here is an exemplary passage from Scented Gardens for the Blind:
How can I take it upon myself to be responsible for the language of speech if the world is struck dumb? Oh, I must urge the furniture to speak, and the walls, and the trees; … perhaps I too shall walk all over the land scattering the dead words upon the soil and watching for the plants which grow from them, all the new trees which will shelter us from the sun and the fires in the sky. It is a new Eden: the growth of articulate speech from the silence that fell like a shroud upon the language. (17)
The outlines of the turning of the soul as described by Murdoch, Howatch and Frame are clear. All three authors emphasise that inner change is a journey from false images and appearances to true vision and true reality. Yet, the differences between the perspectives of Frame, Howatch and Murdoch lead to a critical question for Murdoch’s moral philosophy.
The limits of moral philosophy
Art and religion play a prominent role in Murdoch’s work, obviously because these spheres show clearly how subjective ‘seeing as’ correlates to worldmaking. However, Murdoch conceives of art and religion as moral activities and discusses them in moral terms. She argues that the distinction between untrue and true art and religion depends on the moral force: false art, false religion and fantasising thought merely feed the ego with comfort and consolation, whereas true art and true religion open the way to loving the other in its real otherness. In other words, Murdoch uses her concept of moral change as criteria, as is very clear in her considerations on tragedy, imagination and the void. She mentions Shakespeare’s King Lear, Titian’s Pietà, Weil’s ‘void’ as examples of good art and good spirituality.
Murdoch’s ethical perspective on art and religion is taken up by Laverty and Mylonaki in their reading of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. They aptly capture Murdoch’s criteria of opening the way to loving the other in their characterisation of her theory as a ‘metaphysics of brokenness’. Laverty and Mylonaki argue further that Murdoch’s including of art and religion reveals an unusual and innovative broad scope of her moral philosophy. (18)
Of course, the all-inclusive nature of Murdoch’s moral philosophy is already present in her earlier writings. The Sovereignty of Good (1970) in particular advocates the ubiquity of values, the essential moral condition and continuous moral quality of all human activities, and the absolute reality of the Good. Yet, the comparison with Frame’s and Howatch’s work suggests that the very broadness of Murdoch’s moral philosophy can be problematic too. It risks entailing a sort of ethical colonisation of all kinds of different activities. The aesthetic journey that Frame articulates in her beautiful poetic style, and the religious path that Howatch describes in her gripping stories, point to experiences, acts and reflections which are fundamental to human life, but not in the moral way that Murdoch proposes. For Howatch, religion is about God’s healing love and personal integrity, whereas, as Leeson notes, ‘ultimate consolation is absent for the atheist in Murdoch’. (19) For Frame, art is about revealing and creating multiple layers of meaning; actually, her work is an ode to freedom of the spirit. Therefore, reading Frame and Howatch suggests that Murdoch’s broad moral philosophy does not do justice to the specific realities of art and religion. Frame’s and Howatch’s writings thus point to the limits of Murdoch’s moral philosophy and invite to open the door to other halls of reflection, to academies of art and departments of theology for example.
Honorary distinctions and generous gifts
In conclusion, I want to mention similarities on the level of social institutions. Murdoch, Frame and Howatch were awarded honorary doctorates from universities. At present Howatch is a Honorary Fellow of King’s College, London. Moreover, Frame was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1983, Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1987. They also made donations to encourage research in the fields that they were passionate about. Murdoch generously supported young artists. Frame founded the Janet Frame Literary Trust in 1999. The trust administers grants and awards to New Zealand writers of poetry and imaginative prose. Howatch made a donation to Cambridge University to promote studies in science and religion. In 1994 the Starbridge Lectureship in Theology and Natural Science was established. The present lecturer is Dr Joanna Leidenhag.
Endnotes
1. Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City, Autobiography 3 (London: Harper Collins, 1987), 169.
2. Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Washington: Counterpoint, 2000), 429. King refers to a letter from Murdoch to Cawley, dated 23 November 1979.
3. Robert Cawley, ‘Janet Frame’s Contribution to the Education of a Psychiatrist’, in The Inward Sun. Celebrating the Life and Work of Janet Frame, ed. by Elizabeth Alley (Wellington: Daphne Brasell Associates, 1994, 4-11. With thanks to Katie Dünser for sending the copy from Auckland.
4. C.K. Stead, The Writer at Work (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000), 23.
5. C.K. Stead, The Writer at Work, 22.
6. Mark Delrez, Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame (Amsterdam – New York: Rodopi, 2002), 43, 211.
7. Steve Petford, ‘Susan Howatch. Her True Self’, Interview in MONK, May 2019.
8. Susan Howatch, The Wonder Worker (New York: Random House, 1998), 151. Hereafter TWW.
9. Anne Bancroft, Women in Search of the Sacred (London: Penguin, 1996), 48.
10. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993), 24, 333, 54, 296. Hereafter MGM.
11. Frances White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse: Past Forgiving? (Cham: Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 22.
12. MGM, 332.
13. TWW, 3.
14. TWW, 259, 498-9. Also Susan Howatch, The High Flyer (New York: Random House, 2000), 251-2.
15. Suzanne Bray, ‘Translation and Therapy: Susan Howatch’s St Benet’s Trilogy’, Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, 2013, vol 4, no 1, 49-62. The quotation is from p. 60.
16. Delrez, Manifold Utopia, 211, 221.
17. Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind (New York: George Braziller, 1964, reprint 1980), 216.
18. Evgenia Mylonaki and Megan J. Laverty, ‘A resolute reading of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2025, vol 33, no 3, 758-682.
19. Miles Leeson, ‘Murdoch’s MacKinnon: The Grounding of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, in Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination, ed. by Miles Leeson and Frances White (Cham: Springer Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 183-201.