Dialogues(1987).Murdoch said that her fiction had been influenced by Sartre and Wittgenstein,as well as by Plato,Kant and Simone Weil. However,her critics have called for a distancing of Murdoch's philosophy from her novels,as has the author herself.Elizabeth Dipple has said that"criticism of her novels must,I think,break loose from the compelling frame Murdoch has given"(Dipple 37).Peter Conradi has outlined for Murdoch scholars"[t]he necessary job of discriminating between her works,"arguing that"the work is not an illustration of theory, though it may well comment on it"(Conradi 257).Deborah Johnson offers her opinion that all of Murdoch's novels"pose their own questions and do not need to be explained with reference to some supposedly more authoritative text"(Johnson 3).Murdoch herself said that"I mention philosophy sometimes in the novels because I happen to know about it,just as another writer might talk about coal mining,"but that"I don't want philosophy,as such,to intrude into the novel world at all and I think it doesn't"(Biles 116).She argued,"My novels are not'philosophical novels""(Meyers 217). Although it can be argued that her philosophical studies are not essential to an understanding of her novels,Murdoch's emphasis on moral concems in her fiction has certainly alienated some readers.Lindsay Tucker recognizes that Murdoch's preoccupation with“"banalities”like“goodness'”may"“seem out of place in this postmodern age"(Tucker 9).Murdoch scholars have on occasion found her"moral probings"to be"tedious and pretentious"(Fletcher 26).Murdoch's focus on community, and on the moral life made possible by relationships among people,at a time when British fiction would seem to have lost interest in moral considerations,forges the most important connection between her and two other British women novelists-Drabble and