Iris Murdoch

Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones. He also rediscovers the eternal family servant, the ever-changing "Italian girl".

The Italian Girl

Evil is a sort of machinery. And part of it is that one can’t even suffer properly, one enjoys one’s suffering. Even the notion of punishment becomes corrupt. There are no penances because all that suffering is consolation. What one wants is not suffering but truth: and that would be a kind of suffering one can’t even imagine now.

a pale dreamy face in which the innocent radiance which I remembered shone like a surface mist above the firmer features of a grown-up. Her face had that pure transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children.

The Italian Girl quotes

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