Photo: The cover of 'The Message to the Planet'.
A new kind of religiosity: Jonathan Wooding on Iris Murdoch’s ‘most striking depiction of Quaker sensibility’
‘She is both grounded and ethereal.’
‘My folks were Quakers… I’m a Quaker too except I hardly ever go to Meetings. I’m at home with these people.’ In the late 1980s, Iris Murdoch is writing a novel with the hubristic title The Message to the Planet. By halfway through, a familiar caste of characters – post-faith, questing and obsessive – has turned the screw of the narrator’s plot so tightly that a miracle might well be needed to sort the whole conundrum out. Enter Maisie Tether, Murdoch’s most striking depiction of Quaker sensibility. She is to have a decisive effect on all the principal characters. The narrator quietly hints at the nature of that effect when we hear of Maisie visiting the Lake District: ‘they had found the very pond where Wordsworth had met the Leech Gatherer!’ Wordsworth’s chance encounter with the leech gatherer is forever after associated with recovery from despondency and dejection: ‘like a man from some far region sent, | To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.’
