Iris Murdoch’s fiction is filled with the uncanny and the weird: drowned bodies, vampiric presences, telekinetic objects, angelic visitations, prophetic dreams, and adolescent “feyness.” Yet these phenomena are rarely reducible to her gothic atmosphere or the supernatural. Instead, Murdoch develops a psychology of haunting: a moral-psychological and ethical structure in which the spectral registers the persistence of trauma, the distortions of egoistic fantasy, and the unresolved presence of the past. There has been a significant amount of attention given to Murdoch’s explicitly gothic novels— The Flight from the Enchanter, The Bell, The Unicorn, The Italian Girl, The Time of the Angels—yet the supernatural flows consistently throughout Murdoch’s fictional work, far beyond her early gothic phase. From Jake Donoghue’s perception of Sadie Quentin as a witch in Under the Net to the strange angelic residue of Jackson in Jackson’s Dilemma, haunting becomes an enduring feature of Murdoch’s fictional world. The question is not whether Murdoch “believes” in ghosts but what psychological and ethical work haunting performs. (Details for all of Murdoch’s fictional works can be found here.)
Murdoch’s fictional hauntings can be considered in relation to Jacques Derrida’s conception of hauntology, which he introduced in Specters of Marx. Derrida describes haunting as a mode of being that is neither present nor absent; instead, he claims it as a liminal persistence. In effect, the past endures structurally within the present, demanding ethical reckoning without complete understanding. Murdoch’s novels are saturated with hauntological presences. The past refuses to remain in the past where former lovers, dead parents, and damaged children exert moral pressure long after their disappearance. This is consistent with Murdoch’s own account of fiction as contingent moral space. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she writes: “Literature is a vast scene of confusion, that is of freedom.” Haunting belongs to that confusion, exposing reality’s resistance to closure.
Murdoch’s psychology of haunting is inseparable from her philosophical critique of egoistic fantasy. Indeed, the spectral is often the ego’s projection, the mind’s attempt to transform contingency into enchantment. In “Against Dryness,” Murdoch warns that art must not console the private self: “Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts…to use it as magic.” Later, in The Fire and the Sun, she intensifies this critique: “Magic in its unregenerate form as the fantastic doctoring of the real for consumption by the private ego is the bane of art as it is of philosophy.” The ghost, in Murdoch, is frequently the symptom of such “doctoring”: a fantasy masking moral failure. Her central distinction emerges clearly in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, where she offers “a distinction between egoistic fantasy and liberated truth-seeking imagination,” a distinction between “‘fantasy’ as mechanical, egoistic, untruthful and ‘imagination’ as truthful and free.” Murdoch’s hauntings therefore dramatize the struggle between fantasy as self-enclosure and imagination as ethical attention.
Murdoch’s gothic scenes are psychologically central to the narrative because they destabilize moral certainty. Michael Meade’s dream in The Bell offers one of her most haunting images: nuns drawing a corpse from the Abbey lake. The scene is described as “unutterably sinister and uncanny,” and Michael’s terrified fantasy is that the nuns have committed murder. The haunting here is not supernatural but the complexity of the dreaming fantasy: the recognition that sanctity may (and indeed does in the novel) conceal violence. Effingham Cooper in The Unicorn likewise experiences the eerie certainty of evil’s presence even while knowing rationally that spirits do not exist. The tension in Murdoch’s fiction lies between rational denial and experiential dread: the world exceeds explanation. She notes in her 1947 journal that emotion can transform the determined world into a magical one: “world can suddenly shew itself as magic…social world is magical.” Haunting is thus phenomenological, rooted in perception itself.
One of Murdoch’s most striking uses of the supernatural is her critique of distorted masculinity. Murdoch subtly employs witchcraft imagery in her first-person male narrator novels to expose toxic fantasies. Almost all these narrators use the word “witch” derogatorily toward women, projecting misogynistic fear as supernatural language. In Under the Net, Jake Donoghue imagines Sadie as a snake-like witch, fantasizing that beneath her reflected beauty lies “some terrible old witch.” Martin Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head sees Honor Klein as a “tawny-breasted witch,” an obsessive spectral image that curses him. David Levkin in The Italian Girl fears Elsa as a rusalka-like enchantress. Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince calls his ex-wife Christian “a witch…a low demon.” Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, wonders whether Hartley might become “cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress,” and repeatedly figures Rosina as a black witch against the sky. These hauntings are not paranormal but rather the demonization of female agency when it disrupts the fragile male ego. Murdoch thereby aligns with a phenomenological feminism attentive to individuals in embodied situations rather than abstract rights discourse. The supernatural highlights moral failure and the ethical implications implicit in failing to attend to the other.
Yet Murdoch’s haunting is not entirely negative. She also constructs a female counter-tradition, the adolescent girl as figure of uncanny openness. Alex McCaffrey’s remark in The Philosopher’s Pupil, that “adolescent girls attract ghosts,” gestures toward the cultural association between youth and poltergeist phenomena. Felicity Mor’s “Power Game” in The Sandcastle is an early example, mixing childish witchcraft with darker occult curiosity. Dora Greenfield in The Bell is described as one who will “play the witch” within the community, becoming a catalyst for moral disruption and her own eventual liberation. Murdoch develops this motif most fully in The Green Knight, where Moy Anderson discovers telekinetic powers over stones. Moy experiences her gift as “a strange not unfriendly presence…which joined her life with the life of things.” Her intimacy with inert objects, animals, and the natural world reflects Murdoch’s ethical ideal of attention: a loving gaze outward beyond ego. Yet Moy’s powers fade as she grows older: “The stones…no longer related to her by mysterious ties.” Haunting here becomes the melancholy loss of innocence, the relinquishing of magic necessary for adulthood.
Murdoch’s hauntings then occupy a space between Freud’s rationalism and Jung’s mysticism, two thinkers she engaged with throughout her career. She creates a working psychological terrain where playfulness coexists with grief and remorse and where a hopeless desire for God is part of our deep human desires. This culminates in Murdoch’s repeated engagement with her own dream of holiness: angels, Christ, forgiveness, abasement. Peter J. Conradi notes that this dream haunted her throughout life, recurring in Nuns and Soldiers and The Green Knight. Anne Cavidge’s waking vision of Jesus—“You must be the miracle worker…The work is yours”—is Murdoch’s most explicit supernatural epiphany. Haunting develops into a form of moral demand, not abject terror.
Murdoch’s psychology of haunting is ultimately the psychology of the moral life. Her ghosts register egoistic fantasy, trauma, influence, and metaphysical longing. Haunting becomes the form through which Murdoch dramatizes the difficult demand of attention. As she writes in The Fire and the Sun: “Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away…art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse.” Murdoch’s hauntings do not offer closure; instead they provoke and disturb the reader into accepting the ethical pressure of reality pressing against fantasy.
Miles Leeson
Miles Leeson is the Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. His most recent works include the edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and Poems from An Attic: Selected Poems 1936–1995 (Penguin Vintage, 2026), an edited collection of Iris Murdoch's poetry coedited with and .
