When critics panned Iris Murdoch鈥檚 final novel for its strangely impoverished and repetitive style they didn鈥檛 realise that encroaching Alzheimer鈥檚 disease may already have taken a toll on her creativity.
Widely regarded as one of the UK鈥檚 greatest novelists and philosophers, Murdoch鈥檚 change of style in the 1995 novel Jackson鈥檚 Dilemma may have been an early symptom of her dementia, movingly depicted by Judi Dench in the 2001 film Iris.
Peter Garrard of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London and colleagues compared the text of previous novels Under the Net and the critically acclaimed The Sea, The Sea with Jackson鈥檚 Dilemma. They all employ similar grammatical complexity, but the last book introduces far fewer new words, especially infrequently used ones. 鈥淭his means Alzheimer鈥檚 affects creative writing, and might be detected years before obvious symptoms appear,鈥� says Garrard. But he cautions that the study does not compare the work of authors who did not develop dementia, and nor can he rule out the impact of increasing age alone.
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