As you go into the Penrhyn Road library, there is a large photo on your right of an intense looking woman with a pudding-bowl haircut. For years Iris Murdoch has stared out at Kingston students bustling into the hot, crowded library, while upstairs hundreds of her letters are housed in a special academic centre. Students, tutors and fans travel from across the world to visit the university and learn more about the famous writer, considered by many to be one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.

Now, a new book by David Morgan, one of her former students at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, reveals another side to the woman in the photo. With Love and Rage, published by Kingston University Press, tells of how the two shared a passionate kiss while Murdoch was his tutor and the stormy affair that followed.

Details of her various infidelities and her lesbian affair with another tutor at Oxford University are already known from earlier biographies. But these fresh revelations show just how reckless the late Dame Iris Murdoch could be. They are also a real coup for the university. Although she never taught here, Kingston is fast establishing itself as the international centre for Iris Murdoch studies through its publications and archives.

With this in mind I visited David Morgan to find out more about Kingston’s unusual pin-up and his relationship with her. What I discovered was an unexpected and unconventional love story.

The moment Morgan popped his head round the door of Iris Murdoch’s office for their first tutorial in 1964 something “clicked”. Two or three weeks after that first lesson she invited him round to her flat with a note that ended “Be discreet about this”. That night, while sitting on the sofa with an art book between them, they kissed.  “I can’t remember who made the first move – it happened spontaneously,” Morgan writes in his book. He goes on to describe how he turned back impulsively, after leaving his tutor’s flat, and rang her doorbell. “She came downstairs, opened the door and we grabbed each other, clumsily, on the doorstep, pressing faces together, mine streaming wet.”

"My relationship with Iris Murdoch is inappropriate in the light of now." David Morgan

There were more clandestine meetings after that, and the passion continued for the next two years. Murdoch also used her sway at the art college to argue up Morgan’s final mark to a 2:2 from what, he writes, “should have been a fail”. With Love and Rage's revelations provoked a flurry of interest from national newspapers when it was released, with the Daily Telegraph labelling him her “secret student lover”. Anne Rowe, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University and Director of its Iris Murdoch Centre, said to me: “Her relationship with David Morgan, when he was her student in the 1960s, was at best inappropriate.”

When I put this to him, Morgan balked at the suggestion. An affair now between a senior lecturer and their student would be scandalous, but, he argued, they were far more common in the swinging sixties. “Things have changed and become more chaste. In the sixties there was a breaking down of barriers – the teacher-student thing was an adventure you both went on. My relationship with Iris Murdoch is inappropriate in the light of now.” He also points out that he was only her student for four months.

During that time, and for the months afterwards, it was “full on”. But, he stresses, they never slept together. Editors at the Daily Mail, who quickly set up an interview for a kiss-and-tell expose with Morgan and sent round a photographer for racy pictures of him, leg cocked up on chair, were bitterly disappointed. They were expecting more of a “physical relationship”. Murdoch and Morgan’s passionate, yet unconsummated relationship, does not quite get pulses racing like footballers having affairs with their best friend’s girlfriend or celebrities sending sex texts to page three models.

Instead, there was nothing lascivious in Murdoch’s interest in her student. She had, Morgan argues, a sort of intellectual involvement in his sexual pursuits, which he told her about in outrageous detail. “She wanted to whip things up in real life, so everybody got into a kind of sexual tangle, and she would be in it by proxy,” he explains. “She was a very strange woman and she makes every other woman I’ve met seem extremely shallow in comparison.”

She was also an intensely private person. Morgan knew this as well as anyone after thirty odd years of friendship, and his revelations, albeit not the steamy fare of tabloid papers, weigh heavy on his mind. “I have been kidding myself that she might have forgiven my book and accepted being my subject. If I am honest, she would not have felt any of those things. She would have been furious,” he said, staring straight ahead. 

Their love for one another was far from straightforward. When Murdoch first met Morgan, he was bitterly unhappy and she was incredibly kind and compassionate towards him. But she could also be sharply critical, as she was when Morgan gate-crashed one of her parties with a group of art college friends. The 20 year age gap weighed heavy, particularly, Morgan argues, for him. Murdoch was 44 and Morgan 24 when they first met. “At the time I would not have admitted to myself that I loved her. It was not inkeeping with my hard man image. The student stud would not admit to loving a middle aged woman,” he said.

On her part, though, there was a “typical middle aged woman’s crush” but also genuine love. “Now when I re-read her letters I realise that for a short time I was ‘the one’ – probably only through 1964,” he said. “Not through anything that was particularly terrific about me. She was somebody who always had to be in love with someone. I was just in the right place at the right time.”

Love and rage. Compassion and passion. David Morgan’s memories of Iris Murdoch have helped to shed some more light on that woman with the boyish hair and fixed stare, watching students outside Penrhyn Road library. We won't be able to look at her in the same way again.

'With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch' (KUP, £12.99) is out now.