Researchers studying the last novel of Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma, say “It subtly reveals the onset of Alzheimer’s disease before the author herself could have known.” According to a Guardian story by Tim Radford, the newspaper’s science editor, scientists at the institute of cognitive neuroscience at University College London “compared early novels of Iris Murdoch — Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea — with her final work, and found that her vocabulary had dwindled and her language become simpler.” Radford reports that “The scientists worked from longhand manuscripts sent direct to the publishers, to eliminate any possibility of editorial interference. Using concordance software, they analysed the types of words — nouns, verbs, descriptors and so on — in each novel, and their richness. Comparisons of the three novels showed that her vocabulary became richer in the early stages of her writing career, but showed signs of impoverishment in the final work.” Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, says, “I had felt all along that there was something different about Iris’s last novel, that it was moving but strange in many ways.”