An Unofficial Rose
First English edition cover
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| Author | Iris Murdoch |
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| Cover artist | T. Ritchie |
| Country | England |
| Published | 1962 (Chatto & Windus) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 348 |
| OCLC | 460526258 |
An Unofficial Rose is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1962, it was her sixth novel.
The novel begins with the funeral of Fanny Peronett, the wife of Hugh Peronett. Hugh is a retired civil servant whose son Randall owns a successful rose nursery near Romney Marsh. Randall and his wife Ann have a fourteen-year-old daughter, Miranda. Randall is having an affair in London with Lindsay Rimmer, a young woman who is the secretary and companion of Emma Sands, a detective novelist with whom Hugh had had an affair twenty five years earlier.
Randall is determined to leave Ann for Lindsay, and asks his father for financial help. Hugh complies by selling a valuable painting and giving the proceeds to Randall. Randall takes Lindsay off to Italy, and asks his wife for a divorce. For emotional and religious reasons she is reluctant to grant his request. Felix Meecham, an army officer and family friend, has been in love with Ann for years. After Randall leaves and asks Ann for a divorce, Felix declares his love and urges her to give up hoping for Randall's return. Ann falls in love with Felix, but her daughter Miranda, who is devoted to her father and is herself secretly in love with Felix, convinces her that she should not marry him. Discouraged by Ann's rejection, Felix decides to take a position in India.
Years before, Hugh had broken off his affair with Emma and returned to his wife, but Fanny's death opens up the possibility of his renewing the relationship. He visits Emma in her London flat, where she is always accompanied by Lindsay. After Lindsay's departure Hugh declares his love to Emma, but she refuses him, saying she has already hired another secretary and companion. At the end of the novel, Hugh is on his way to India for a holiday, accompanying Felix and Felix's older sister Mildred, who is in love with Hugh.
The novel's title and epigraph are taken from Rupert Brooke's poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. In the poem, which was written in Berlin in 1912, Brooke contrasts his beloved English countryside with the German city around him. The disciplined German tulips, he says, "bloom in rows", unlike the "unkempt" wild roses in England. Along with its obvious relevance to the rose nursery setting of the book, the title refers to the formlessness of Ann Peronett's character. The lack of self-assertiveness that Randall criticizes as making her "as messy and flabby and open as a bloody dogrose", is also part of what makes her a virtuous but, to some readers, a dull character.
Romantic love is a dominant theme of An Unofficial Rose, in which each of the main characters is in love with at least one of the others. In this novel most of the emotional attachments, whether or not they are reciprocated or acknowledged, have existed in some form for some time. This contrasts with some of Murdoch's other novels, in which "people implausibly fall suddenly and often disastrously in love", and lends an air of naturalism to the plot.
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