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In her 1970 essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, in which she discusses two types of novels and their heroes, Iris Murdoch says about the existentialist novel:
We know this novel and its hero well. The story of a brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him, (…) He might do anything.
About the second type she says,
The mystical novel is both newer and more old-fashioned. What is characteristic of this novel is that it keeps in being, by one means or another, the conception of God. Man is still pictured as being divided, but divided in a new way, between a fallen nature and a spiritual world. I call these novels mystical, not of course as a term of praise, but because they are attempts to express a religious consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion. (…) The virtues of the existentialist hero are sincerity and courage, the mystic’s virtue is humility. The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism.