An Unofficial Rose

Iris Murdoch

After his wife’s death, Hugh contemplates returning to his former mistress. His son, Randall, longs to abandon his shapeless marriage for a perfect partner. Randall’s young daughter, Miranda, is adored by her Australian cousin Penn, but has attachments elsewhere. Her mother Ann has her own private dream, while taking upon herself the strains and pains of all the others. Impelled by affection, lust and illusion, these characters search for love within a tightly woven web.

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‘…Although Murdoch illustrates love between men much more frequently in her fiction than love between women, she depicts male homosexuality or lesbianism to some extent in nearly all of her twenty-six novels, and it could be argued that many of these representations of same-sex desire share similarities with social constructionist theory. For example, one could argue that the controlling Emma Sands in An Unofficial Rose (1962), the aggressive Mitzi Richardo in An Accidental Man (1971), and the cigar-smoking, gender-bending Patricia Raven in Henry and Cato (1976) are represented as ‘masculine’ or ‘butch’ lesbians, consistent with the then-prevalent societal expectation that female homosexuals were marked by their mannish appearance or demeanor. In addition, Humphrey Finch in An Unofficial Rose, whose homosexuality is an open secret to those in his community, lives in a sexless heterosexual marriage ostensibly to conform to social norms, while Theodore Gray in The Nice and the Good (1968) and Edgar Demarnay in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) are male homosexual characters who remain ‘in the closet’ even to those closest to them, which again illustrates the social pressures confronting homosexuals’ ~ Tammy Grimshaw, Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36, No. 4 (winter 2004), pp. 552-570

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Details

ISBN	9780701109844
Genre	Fiction
Publication Date	Dec-62
Publisher	Chatto and Windus
No. of Pages	352
Language	English
Rating	Good
BookID	13933

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An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch