The Italian Girl, by Iris Murdoch

Almost the first thing I learned in English 101 at Melbourne University, was that the English novel has its origins in morality plays. And with apologies to Proper Academics who know what they’re talking about when it comes to Iris Murdoch, I reckon The Italian Girl is not one of IM’s ‘bad novels’ as Kenneth Trodd would have it in the New Left Review from 1964.  His review was paywalled, so I could only read a bit of it, sufficient to know that he took A Dim View of this novel, describing it as a genre between Green Penguins and old Gothic. I think that The Italian Girl has its origins in morality plays and a Shakespearean comedy of errors. The novel masquerades as melodrama and it’s not meant to be realism.  Rather, it uses a modern day quest for inheritance and identity to mask its framework of temptation, sin…