We each tend to perform different versions of ourselves in different situations: either polite or petulant with parents; less restrained around friends than around colleagues; more instinctually deferential to elders than to juniors. These are the kinds of tonal gradations letters cannot help but reveal. On the page, a letter writer—especially if she is also an accomplished author—calibrates her language precisely, aiming well-turned (or perhaps deliberately dashed-off) phrases at an audience of one. The Irish-born novelist Iris Murdoch, whose letters have been collected in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, was particularly insistent that the audience for her letters—the audience for her performance of a particular persona—should be restricted to only one person at a time. “Destroy this and all letters,” Murdoch writes at the bottom of a missive written in 1969 to an ex-student with whom she’d become “intensely, and unwisely, emotionally involved.” She adds: “And keep your mouth shut.”

Writing in 1943 to Frank Thompson, a fellow student at Oxford who had volunteered for the army and been stationed in Iraq—and was perhaps in love with her—she is casually confessional: “I should tell you that I have parted company with my virginity.” Writing to David Morgan, one of her students at the Royal College of Art, she instructs, then flirts, then chides (“I am, to be frank, a bit dismayed that you have been either unable or unwilling to get a job this summer”). To Raymond Queneau, a French writer with whom she had an emotionally charged friendship, she is agreeable, eager, and, when overeager—after, for example, a visit during which she expressed, too blatantly, her wish that their relationship might become a romantic one—apologetic (“I’m sorry about the scene on the bridge—or rather, I’m sorry in the sense that I ought either to have said nothing or to have said something sooner”).

She is occasionally repetitive in her turns of phrase (the locution “in situ” is an early favorite), and caught between a gregarious nature and a desire for solitude, as people both serious and young so often are. “One of the best things about being here,” she writes from Blackpool, on England’s northwest coast, in 1940, “is that I am quite cut off from the endless acquaintances who used to be always passing through London and calling on me. I have time to read, thank God.” She despairs, with a spontaneous passion that feels genuine rather than put-on, of her talents, her very mind: “I feel at the moment,” she writes in 1975, “that I shall never THINK again, but I daresay thoughts will return.” Presumably they did; three years later, she won the Booker Prize.

LIVING ON PAPER: LETTERS FROM IRIS MURDOCH, 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe Princeton University Press, 688 pp., $39.95

Many reviewers of the letters in Britain, where they were released several months ago, expressed unease about these multiple versions of Murdoch. Roger Lewis, writing in the London Times, suggested that the letters reveal infidelities so frequent that “had she been from the working class, instead of a fellow of an Oxford college with heaps of honorary degrees, she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilization.” The editors of Living on Paper treat this matter delicately in their introduction, characterizing Murdoch’s personal life as “complicated” with “each of her many correspondents unaware of…the many others to whom Murdoch also wrote.” Murdoch produced, over the course of her life, twenty-six novels, as well as several plays and numerous philosophical essays; reviewers of Living on Paper have largely seen these accomplishments as less intriguing than the fact that she also maintained a series of frequently overlapping romantic (though not always physical; as Peter Conradi notes in his biography, “Iris’s adult philosophy, both written and lived, was to give to non-sexual love an absolutely central place.”) relationships with men and women both.

In a memoir of their marriage, Murdoch’s husband of 43 years John Bayley seems almost painfully aware that the reading public was privy to his wife’s emotional and physical dalliances. “Friendship meant a great deal to her,” he writes, reasonably enough. Then, more defensively, “It was a sign of how much she valued her friends that she kept them so separate.” More than once, he emphasizes the pleasures of solitude in marriage, which is at once “a pledge of complete understanding” and “precludes nothing outside the marriage.” That this reads as a preemptive rebuttal aimed at critics of their domestic arrangement matters less than that solitude was and did—at least for them. Bayley and Murdoch married in 1956, and remained so until her death in 1999. And if Bayley at times nevertheless despaired at the affairs Murdoch allowed herself, he also refused to be defeated by them: if the woman he held tight to was sometimes someone else’s lover, she remained, ultimately, also his wife.