Iris Murdoch artworks from a secret room go on display – including a self-portrait

Artworks by the Booker Prize-winning novelist Iris Murdoch — including the only self-portrait she is known to have painted — have been discovered in a secret room in her former Oxford home and are going on display for the first time. The Guardian reports that the paintings and sketches, made when Murdoch was a student at the start of the second world war, reveal an early interest in surrealism and in the naked female form.

More than 80 works were found last year at 30 Charlbury Road by Dr Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. The room’s door was hidden behind a large bookcase — ‘like an inner sanctum’ — and Leeson believes no one had been inside it for decades. Until now, Murdoch was known to have created only three paintings in her lifetime.

The finds include a self-portrait dated 7 January 1941, four surrealist landscape paintings and sketches of female nudes from a period when Murdoch had recently realised she was bisexual. Twenty-five of the newly discovered works feature in the exhibition ‘Iris Murdoch Amongst the Artists’ at the University of Chichester Library until 10 December — the first ever devoted to Murdoch as an artist.