The Red and the Green

Pat Dumay is a Catholic and an Irish patriot. His relentlessly pious mother pursues her own private war with his stepfather, a man sunk in religious speculation and drink. Pat's English-bred Protestant cousin and rival, Andrew Chase-White, an officer in King Edward's Horse, puzzles out his complex emotions about Ireland and Frances, the girl he loves, against a background of the fear of death, while Frances's father, Christopher Bellman, scholar and cynic, finds love of Ireland a more passionate matter than he had bargained for. Weaving between these tensions and patterns moves Millie Kinnard: fast, feminist,and only just respectable. As rebellion looms nearer, tension mounts in the sombre rain-soaked Dublin streets; and if, in the end, death disperses most of the people, this is felt to be as inevitable as in a Sophoclean play.

About the Author

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a fellow of St Anne's college.

Her first published novel, Under The Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's Honours List. She died in February 1999