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Outline of the plot

Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a 41 year-old well-to-do wine merchant whose childless marriage to an older woman called Antonia has been one of convenience rather than love. It never occurs to him that his ongoing affair with a young academic called Georgie could be immoral. Displaying quite a number of machoBeing macho is overconforming to traditional male gender roles or hypermasculinity and often implies misogyny. See: butch machismo masculine misogyny sexist MACHO also stands for Massive Compact Halo Object. attributes in his relationships with women, Lynch-Gibbon is shocked when, out of the blue, his wife tells him that she is going to leave him for Palmer Anderson, her psychoanalystPsychoanalysis is the revelation of unconscious relations, in a systematic way through an associative process. The fundamental subject matter of psychoanalysis is the unconscious patterns of life revealed through the analysand's (the patient's) free assoc and a friend of the couple's, with whom she has had a secret affair for quite some time. Lynch-Gibbon moves out of their London house but still does not want to publicize his affair with Georgie let alone become engaged to her.

At roughly the same time CupidIn Roman mythology, Cupid was the god of erotic love. Cupid's lineage There are differing stories about his parentage. Cicero provides three different lineages: son of Mercury ( Hermes) and Diana ( Artemis), son of Mercury and Venus ( Aphrodite), and son's arrow hits Lynch-Gibbon again. This time he falls for Honor Klein, Anderson's stepsister, who is a lecturer in anthropologyAnthropology (from the Greek word ANTHROPOLOGIA consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo . It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all dimensions of humanity. Central to anthropology is the concept of at CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is the second-oldest academic institution in the English-speaking world (after Oxford). According to legend, the University was founded in 1209 by scholars escaping Oxford after a fight with locals. Cambridge and the University, a woman who, on seeing her for the first time, he remembers finding rather repulsive. Like a man possessed, he follows her to CambridgeThis article is about Cambridge, England; see also other places called Cambridge. The city of Cambridge is an old English University town and the regional centre of the county of Cambridgeshire. It lies approximately 50 miles (80 km) north of London and i and, in the middle of the night, breaks into her house, only to find her in bed with her stepbrother. When, shortly afterwards, Antonia confesses to him that she has also been sleeping with his older brother Alexander ever since he introduced them to each other ("You mean you didn't know at all? Surely you must have guessed."), Lynch-Gibbon's world starts disintegrating. Despite his being a wine merchant, he chooses whiskyWhisky (or whiskey is an alcoholic beverage distilled from grain, often including malt, which has then been aged in wooden barrels. Spelling The spelling "Whisky" is generally used for those distilled in Scotland, Canada, and Japan, while "whiskey" (with as his constant companion. In the end, however, he realizes that life must -- and somehow will -- go on.

In A Severed Head, Murdoch succeeds in presenting a middle-aged bourgeois who initially thinks of himself as a survivor but realizes that he is in fact a victim. Throughout the novel, all the main characters insist that they have long overcome conventional morality, that they are free agents in the truest sense of the word, but in spite of his hedonism Lynch-Gibbon's residual moral posture just will not go away. Murdoch is particularly good at conveying the atmosphere of benevolence and the apparent lack of hard feelings among the individuals that have wronged and been wronged. ("It is not at all our idea that you should leave us. In a strange and rather wonderful way we can't do without you. We shall hold on to you, we shall look after you," Anderson says to Lynch-Gibbon, who sees himself as a cuckold rather than anything else.) At times funny, sad at others, A Severed Head also deals with more serious issues such as abortion (Georgie terminates her pregnancy at an early stage of her relationship with Lynch-Gibbon) and attempted suicide (again it is Georgie who tries to take her own life after being rejected by both Lynch-Gibbon and his brother).

Despite these serious overtones, A Severed Head is regarded by many readers as the most entertaining of Murdoch's novels. As British novelist William Sutcliffe put it, "Of all the lots-of-people-screwing-lots-of-other-people novels this is probably the best, and certainly the weirdest. With less philosophising and more shagging than Murdoch's other books, it is a joy to see this wonderful writer let her hair (and her knickers) down."