Abstract
The Bell is one of Murdoch’s most important and popular achievements. Less melodramatic and less willing to deploy the devices of the romance than many of her others (even though it trades in familiar scenarios and character-types) its sense of restraint renders it more like a ‘traditional’ version of realism than much of her early work. The novel also shows how naturally a preoccupation with the past functions as the motor in Murdoch’s fiction, driving the other themes she is perhaps more consciously keen to deal with, such as religion, subjectivity, and the nature of love.