A previously unpublished series of poems by the late novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch is to be printed, shedding new light on her life and relationships, and marking the first time the writer’s bisexuality has been explored in her published works of fiction or poetry.

Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.

Murdoch wrote poetry throughout her life, until her death in 1999. Though she is celebrated as one of the 20th century’s foremost novelists – winning the Booker prize with her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea – her poetry has remained largely unknown.

The volume includes an introduction by Booker-shortlisted author Sarah Hall. Penguin, the book’s publisher, describes the work as being for “anyone who has at one time or another gone soul-searching in the midst of heartbreak”.

The collection of 88 poems spans nearly 60 years, and explores personal themes from the writer’s bisexuality to the joys of friendship, offering a fresh autobiographical perspective on Murdoch’s life.

Born in Dublin in 1919, Murdoch worked in the Treasury and at the United Nations before discovering philosophy, eventually becoming a fellow at Saint Anne’s college, Oxford. She wrote 26 novels in 41 years, always famously resistant to editorial interference, and was also a philosopher, whose works such as The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) remain influential. A scholar of Plato, she wove philosophical concerns into her fiction.

Much of the collection comes from a set of 10 notebooks discovered in 2016, when editors Anne Rowe and Miles Leeson were invited to explore the attic of Murdoch’s Oxford home, where she lived with her husband, the writer and critic John Bayley, during the final decade of her life. One of the collection’s poems, printed below, was found in an unpublished journal, and a small handful were previously published.

One of the most striking works in the collection is the poem ‘The dear and detailed dream of your carved head’, widely believed to have been written for the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. In her journal, Murdoch described the brief, charged period in 1948 when she and Anscombe shared “three days of courtship” while both were teaching at Oxford.

Murdoch’s journals reveal a deep anxiety about her sexuality being exposed. A mutual friend warned her that even a “sentimental” relationship between the two women would be Anscombe’s “ruin” – and Murdoch notes in the poem that her longing to “possess” Anscombe “is to desire your death”. The day after writing it, she expressed panic in her diary, wondering whether she should destroy the previous three weeks’ worth of entries. Seven pages from that section were ultimately cut out with a razor blade.

In her introduction, Hall describes Murdoch as “a writer of formidable and industrious intellect, playfully mischievous around taboos”, whose work includes reflections on sexual fluidity, bisexuality and polyamory, anticipating discussions of these topics long before they were part of public discourse. She notes that the collection includes poems “written for women she held relationships with, or wanted to”, which are “especially ardent, complex, tender and gorgeous”, reading as “vulnerable documents, wishes blown softly towards those who fascinated her”.

‘The dear and detailed dream of your carved head’

The dear and detailed dream of your carved head
Fills all the dim dimensions of my pain.
Your most intent desiring lips and eyes
Brim from the mirror where I ask my name.
This sudden sweet complicity, the Greek
Verse that you told me, all our dear illusion
Turns black between us when we speak
Or act or move to a conclusion.
For I could wish to possess you forever so,
My darling, immobilised in the gesture
Of reaching toward me. Yet I know
That this is to desire your death. Your nature
Being hard and high, you must be set free;
Two secret evil forms will lie enlaced in me.