Iris Murdoch

The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, follows the lives of Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by his homosexual former lover. Repriint.

The Bell

Youth is a marvellous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman

By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

The Bell quotes

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