We know it’s not good behaviour to complain about reviews. As academics who have published books and articles, we’ve learned to celebrate the good ones and take the bad ones in our stride. And we expected the collection we edited, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995 to divide readers. Neither Murdoch nor her novels are to everyone’s taste.

However, we have been astonished by the number of reviewers who have been so fiercely judgmental of Murdoch’s personal life; she has been described as “ruthless”, “disloyal”, “self-centred”, “self-indulgent, morally bogus and emotionally incontinent” and even “lazy” (Really? This woman wrote 26 novels and several books of philosophy as well as lecturing and teaching for many years.) It is true that Murdoch lived unconventionally, could be manipulative and that she often had two or more intense relationships running at the same time – but she was also a kind and modest person, full of doubt about her own abilities despite her intellectual brilliance. Her sense of self was amused, rather than inflated, by the title of Dame, which she never used. Her letters show many acts of thoughtfulness and generosity as well as a wicked sense of fun; there is not a hint of malice or pomposity in any of them. As Anne Chisholm comments in Prospect, they are “conversational, intimate, affectionate” rather than written with an eye on posterity.

So it is particularly galling to see many reviewers concentrating, sometimes rather salaciously, on Murdoch’s sex life and savagely criticising her for “promiscuity”. John Carey uses the word twice in his article (Sunday Times) and Jonathan Gibbs is uneasy about “the promiscuity of Murdoch’s intellectual affairs” (Independent). Roger Lewis writes rather shockingly 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 sterilisation” (Times). We have yet to read similar personal attacks on the behaviour of Michael Oakeshott – the political theorist and one of Murdoch’s correspondents – who was nicknamed “dipstick” during his army years because of his sexual philandering.

Interestingly, Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life has not provoked anything like the same level of personal criticism, despite the fact that Hughes’s “disloyalty” manifested itself in affairs with many women even when he was supposedly happily married to his second wife. Indeed, some reviewers fall over themselves to subscribe to Hughes’s own self-deluding myth-making. Melvyn Bragg’s account of Bate’s biography opens with the romantic declaration: “He lived the lives of many men called Ted Hughes. Driven, all of them, by a core of energy so bright and fierce it burned out many of those he encountered” (Observer). And he uses the rather coy phrase “nomadic sex” to describe Hughes’s sexual rampaging, lending it the air of a cheerful camping expedition. Several reviewers readily cite Hughes’s own claim that he couldn’t bear to be “caged” by one woman, as if he were a glorious jaguar who needed to range free. While admiring Bate’s biography, John Mullan is one of the few readers to express qualms about Hughes’s justification of his frenetic sex-life, noting that “the poet’s self-mythologising sanctioned the harm he did to others”, adding that the resulting “muddle and self-deception” tormented “himself and the many who loved him” (Guardian). David Sexton is more forthright, describing Hughes in rather blokey language as a “prodigious shagger” (Evening Standard). But even those few reviewers who are critical of Hughes’s behaviour fight shy of using the word “promiscuous”.

So men are glorious phallic trail-blazers when they tear through many women’s lives whereas women who have had many lovers are “ruthless” and “self-indulgent”. How have such double standards survived in an intelligent reading population of the 21st century? Murdoch, whose first novel was published in 1954, was a woman decades ahead of her time – she had both male and female lovers and refused to be labelled as lesbian or bisexual. Instead, she experienced what we now call “gender fluidity”, expressed in The Bell (1958) as “the sophistication of holding that we all participate in both sexes”. While Hughes clung on to archaic myths about masculinity in order to justify his promiscuity, Murdoch spent her energy, in her letters as well as in her novels, challenging received ideas about gender, religion and philosophy. Lara Feigel concluded her thoughtful review of Living on Paper with the comment: “Few books leave the reader with as dizzying a sense of the need to question absolutely everything” (Daily Telegraph). Murdoch, throughout her life, questioned what it means to be free and what it means to have a sexual identity. It is a pity that so many reviewers, blinded by their prejudices, have been unable to see that.