Iris Murdoch and the reality of other people

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/13/iris-murdoch-100-books-full-passion-disaster

Short extract:

A crucial idea in Murdoch’s fiction is the reality of others, a material fact that we are confronted with daily but, in our innermost selves, seem hardly able to grasp. We glimpse them in continually evolving contexts inflected with our own agendas, which may also remain mysterious to us. That situation, often manifesting itself in the form of a dilemma, struck her as the novel’s primary concern. An essay she wrote in 1959 argues: “Prose literature can reveal an aspect of the world which no other art can reveal … and in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed, not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.”

To write a novel, Murdoch continues, is to quickly discover that “however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people’, this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a real character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one’s failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.”