The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.
The Bell (2001), ch. 9, p. 119. (1958)
We can only learn to love by loving.
The Bell (2001), ch. 19, p. 219.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 (1959) p. 51.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
A Severed Head (1976) p. 61. (1961)
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
A Severed Head (1976) p. 181
I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
The Red and the Green|The Red and the Green (1965), ch. 2, p. 30.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.
The Nice and the Good, ch. 22.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat|A Fairly Honourable Defeat (2001) p. 170. (1970)
Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.
The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.
Dame Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 19198 February 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel,
Under the NetUnder the Net was the first novel of Iris Murdoch, published in 1954. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular....
, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the
Order of the British EmpireThe Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
. In 2008,
The TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
named Murdoch among their list of "The 50 greatest
British writersBritish Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...
since 1945".
Life
Jean Iris Murdoch was born at 59 Blessington Street,
Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from
HillhallHillhall is a townland and non-nucleated village in County Down, Northern Ireland, near Lisburn. In the 2001 Census it had a population of about one hundred people. It lies in the Lagan Valley Regional Park and the Lisburn City Council area...
, County Down, and her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as a singer until Iris was born, was from a middle class,
Church of IrelandThe Church of Ireland is an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. The church operates in all parts of Ireland and is the second largest religious body on the island after the Roman Catholic Church...
(Anglican) family from Dublin. When Iris was very young, her parents moved to London, where her father worked in the Civil Service.
She was educated in private progressive schools, first at the
Froebel Demonstration SchoolIbstock Place School is an independent co-educational day school for pupils aged 3 to 18 located in Roehampton, south-west London.The School was founded as the Froebel Demonstration School, the name meaning that it was connected with the Froebel Institute and the demonstration of its educational...
, and then as a boarder at the
Badminton SchoolMiriam Badock established a school for girls in 1858 at Badminton House in Clifton. By 1898 it had become known as Miss Bartlett's School for Young Ladies....
in Bristol in 1932. She went on to read classics, ancient history, and philosophy at
Somerville College, OxfordSomerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and was one of the first women's colleges to be founded there...
, and philosophy as a postgraduate at
Newnham College, CambridgeNewnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College...
, where she met
Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.
She wrote her first novel,
Under the Net, in 1954, having previously published essays on philosophy, and the first
monograph studyA monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
in English of
Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
. It was at
OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
in 1956 that she met and married John Bayley, a professor of English literature and also a novelist. She went on to produce 25 more novels and other works of philosophy and drama until 1995, when she began to suffer the early effects of Alzheimer's disease, the symptoms of which she at first attributed to writer's block. She died, aged 79, in 1999, and her ashes were scattered in the garden at the Oxford Crematorium. She had no children.
Writings
Her philosophical writings were influenced by
Simone WeilSimone Weil , was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist.-Biography:Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. She grew up in comfortable circumstances, and her father was a doctor. Her only sibling was...
(from whom she borrows the concept of 'attention'), and by
PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, under whose banner she claimed to fight. In re-animating Plato, she gives force to the reality of the Good, and to a sense of the moral life as a pilgrimage from illusion to reality. From this perspective, Murdoch's work offers perceptive criticism of
SartreJean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
and
WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
('early' and 'late'). Her most central parable concerns a mother-in-law 'M' who works to see her daughter-in-law 'D' "justly or lovingly" and to overcome an obscuring jealousy. The parable is partly meant to show (against Oxford contemporaries including
R. M. HareRichard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...
and
Stuart HampshireSir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an Oxford University philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.Hampshire was educated at Repton School and at...
) the importance of the 'inner' life to moral action. The parable also draws a connection between loving faith in an individual and seeing them aright. This is of significance for Murdoch's wider theory of knowledge, and for her conception of her craft as a novelist. It is the interest, for Murdoch, of St Anselm's remarks in the
ontological argumentThe ontological argument for the existence of God is an a priori argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument was first proposed by the eleventh-century monk Anselm of Canterbury, who defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive...
, "I believe in order to understand".
Her novels, in their attention and generosity to the inner lives of individuals, follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoevsky,
TolstoyLev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
,
George EliotMary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
, and
ProustValentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, besides showing an abiding love of
ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. There is however great variety in her achievement, and the richly layered structure and compelling realistic imagination of
The Black PrinceThe Black Prince is Iris Murdoch's 15th novel, first published in 1973. The name of the novel alludes mainly to Hamlet.-Plot summary:The Black Prince is remarkable for the structure of its narrative, consisting of a central story bookended by forewords and post-scripts by characters within it...
is very different from the early comic work
Under The Net or
The Unicorn.
The Unicorn (1963) can be read as a sophisticated
GothicGothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
romanceAs a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing.
The Black PrinceThe Black Prince is Iris Murdoch's 15th novel, first published in 1973. The name of the novel alludes mainly to Hamlet.-Plot summary:The Black Prince is remarkable for the structure of its narrative, consisting of a central story bookended by forewords and post-scripts by characters within it...
(1973), for which Murdoch won the
James Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
, is a study of
erotic obsessionHypersexuality is extremely frequent or suddenly increased sexual urges or sexual activity. Hypersexuality is typically associated with lowered sexual inhibitions. Although hypersexuality can be caused by some medical conditions or medications, in most cases the cause is unknown...
, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious "editor" of the book in a series of afterwords. Though novels differ markedly, and her style developed, themes recur. Her novels often include upper middle class intellectual males caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, refugees, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters — a type of man Murdoch is said to have modelled on her lover, the
NobelThe Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
laureate
Elias CanettiElias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
.
Murdoch was awarded the
Booker PrizeThe Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...
in 1978 for
The Sea, the SeaThe Sea, the Sea is the 19th novel by Iris Murdoch. It won the Booker Prize in 1978.-Plot summary:The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs...
, a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired stage director who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart. Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels
An Unofficial Rose and
The Bell.
J. B. PriestleyJohn Boynton Priestley, OM , known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions , as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls...
's dramatisation of her 1961 novel
A Severed HeadA Severed Head is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch.Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilized and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle class people who are lucky to be free of...
starred
Ian HolmSir Ian Holm, CBE is an English actor known for his stage work and for many film roles. He received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in The Homecoming and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear...
and
Richard AttenboroughRichard Samuel Attenborough, Baron Attenborough , CBE is a British actor, director, producer and entrepreneur. As director and producer he won two Academy Awards for the 1982 film Gandhi...
.
Politics
From 1938, she was, like a large proportion of her Oxford contemporaries, a member of the
Communist Party of Great BritainThe Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
, The timing of her departure from the party seems uncertain. Conradi notes that she left twice: once technically in 1942, so she could get a job at
HM TreasuryHM Treasury, in full Her Majesty's Treasury, informally The Treasury, is the United Kingdom government department responsible for developing and executing the British government's public finance policy and economic policy...
, and then, at the end of that decade, leaving spiritually, as her philosophical thinking developed and she digested the lessons of
Arthur KoestlerArthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
's
Darkness at NoonDarkness at Noon is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940...
. A.N. Wilson remarked that Iris Murdoch joined the Communist Party for 'religious' reasons, and Conradi concurs that she left for exactly the same sort of reason. She nevertheless remained close to the left for a long time. She subsequently had trouble getting a visa to the United States because of her former party membership. Around 1988–1990, she commented that her membership in the Communist Party had helped her see "how strong and how awful it [Marxism] is, certainly in its organized form".
[ In 1983 (two years before Neil Kinnock]Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock is a Welsh politician belonging to the Labour Party. He served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until 1995 and as Labour Leader and Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition from 1983 until 1992 - his leadership of the party during nearly nine years making him...
famously confronted Derek HattonDerek 'Degsy' Hatton is a broadcaster, businessman and after-dinner speaker. He won celebrity status as a local politician in Liverpool during the 1980s, where he was deputy leader of the city council, and a supporter of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency.-Early life:He attended Liverpool Institute...
) she writes to Phillipa Foot that she "did not much like the Tories [...] [but] the Labour Party is [...] contaminated by the extreme left". Believing that their extreme aims were "to abolish parliamentary democracy" she vociferously attacked Arthur ScargillArthur Scargill is a British politician who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002, leading the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history...
, remarking during the 1981 Miners' Strike that "they should be put up against the wall and shot."
Ireland is the other sensitive detail of Murdoch' political life that seems to attract interest. Part of the interest revolves around the fact that, although Irish by both birth and traced descent on both sides, Murdoch does not display the full set of political opinions that are sometimes assumed to go with this origin: "No one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris's Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish... [but] with both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris has as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American". Conradi notes A.N. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in 'The Red and the Green', and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978. The novel while broad of sympathy is hardly an unambiguous celebration of the 1916 rising, dwelling upon bloodshed, unintended consequences and the evils of romanticism, besides celebrating selfless individuals on both sides. Iris Murdoch's father Hughes Murdoch, from Ulster, was an Officer in the British Cavalry in France at the time of the Rising. Her mother Rene Richardson was a Dubliner, and it was in Dublin that Murdoch's parents first met, while Hughes was on leave from the front. Later, of Ian PaisleyIan Richard Kyle Paisley, Baron Bannside, PC is a politician and church minister in Northern Ireland. As the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party , he and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness were elected First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively on 8 May 2007.In addition to co-founding...
, Iris Murdoch stated “[he] sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12-15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul I’m afraid."
Biographies and memoirs
Peter J. ConradiPeter J. Conradi is a British author and academic.-Career:He is known as a biographer, having written Iris Murdoch: A Life, an official biography of his friend Iris Murdoch, and also a life of Angus Wilson...
's 2001 biography was the fruit of long research and authorised access to journals and other papers. It is also a labour of love, and of a friendship with Murdoch that extended from a meeting at her Gifford Lectures to her death. The book was well received. John UpdikeJohn Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
commented: "There would be no need to complain of literary biographies [...] if they were all as good". The text addresses many popular questions about Murdoch such as how Irish she was, what her politics were. Though not a trained philosopher, Conradi's interest in Murdoch's achievement as a Thinker is evident in the biography, and yet more so in his earlier work of literary criticism The Saint and the Artist: A Study of Iris Murdoch's Works (Macmillan 1986, HarperCollins 2001). He also recalled his personal encounters with Murdoch in Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me. (Short Books, 2005). Conradi's archive of material on Murdoch, together with Iris Murdoch's Oxford library, is held at Kingston UniversityKingston University is a public research university located in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, United Kingdom. It was originally founded in 1899 as Kingston Technical Institute, a polytechnic, and became a university in 1992....
.
An account of Murdoch's life with a different ambition is given by A. N. WilsonAndrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views...
in his 2003 book Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. The work was described by The GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
as "mischievously revelatory" and labelled by Wilson himself as an "anti-biography". It eschews Conradi's objectivity, but is careful to stress his current and past affection for his subject. Wilson's work describes a woman who was "prepared to go to bed with almost anyone" and Conradi is similarly frank. A central difference is that while Murdoch's Thought is for Conradi an inspiration to his "Going Buddhist", Wilson treats Murdoch's philosophical work as at best a distraction. In a BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
discussion of Murdoch and her work in 2009, Wilson assented to BidishaBidisha is a feminist, critic, broadcaster and writer. She began writing professionally for arts magazines such as i-D, Dazed and Confused and the NME at the age of 15 and published her first novel at 18.-Early life:Bidisha is an only child, her parents are both lecturers in information technology...
's view that Murdoch's philosophical output consisted of nothing but “GCSE-style” essays on PlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
., and even suggested that Murdoch's later philosophical work "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" was a mistake that precipitated Murdoch into Alzheimers. This would be the area of difference between Wilson and Conradi. This dispute between two literary figures about the status of Murdoch's philosophical contribution has some life also among professional philosophers.
The aspect of memoir in Wilson's "anti-biography" is developed in David Morgan's With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston University Press 2010). Morgan is as direct and subjective about Murdoch as is Wilson.
Murdoch was portrayed by Kate WinsletKate Elizabeth Winslet is an English actress and occasional singer. She has received multiple awards and nominations. She was the youngest person to accrue six Academy Award nominations, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Reader...
and Judi DenchDame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA is an English film, stage and television actress.Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo...
in Richard EyreSir Richard Charles Hastings Eyre CBE is an English director of film, theatre, television, and opera.-Biography:Eyre was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in north-west Dorset in south-west England, followed by Peterhouse at the University...
's film Iris (2001), based on Bayley's memories of his wife as she developed Alzheimer's disease. Parts of the movie were filmed at SouthwoldSouthwold is a town on the North Sea coast, in the Waveney district of the English county of Suffolk. It is located on the North Sea coast at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is around south of Lowestoft and north-east...
in Suffolk, one of Murdoch's favourite holiday places.
Works by Iris Murdoch
Fiction
- Under the Net
Under the Net was the first novel of Iris Murdoch, published in 1954. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular....
(1954)
- The Flight from the Enchanter
The Flight from the Enchanter is a novel written by Iris Murdoch and published in 1956.Principal Characters:*Mischa Fox*Rosa Keepe*Hunter Keepe *Annette Cockeyne*Peter Saward*John Rainborough*Calvin Blick...
(1956)
- The Sandcastle
The Sandcastle is a novel by Iris Murdoch, published in 1957. It is the story of a middle-aged schoolmaster with political ambitions who meets a young painter , come to paint the Headmaster's portrait.-Synopsis:...
(1957)
- The Bell
The Bell is a novel written by Iris Murdoch in 1958. It was her fourth to be published, and is set in Imber Court, a lay religious community situated next to an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns in Gloucestershire.-Plot summary:...
(1958)
- A Severed Head
A Severed Head is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch.Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilized and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle class people who are lucky to be free of...
(1961)
- An Unofficial Rose (1962)
- The Unicorn (1963)
- The Italian Girl
-Plot introduction:Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones...
(1964)
- The Red and the Green
The Red and the Green is a 1965 novel by Iris Murdoch that covers the events leading up to and during the Easter Rebellion in Ireland during World War I...
(1965)
- The Time of the Angels (1966)
- The Nice and the Good (1968)
- Bruno's Dream
Bruno's Dream is a 1969 novel by Iris Murdoch. Set in London it tells the story of a dying man called Bruno and his family. Narrated in the third person that allows for multiple character perspectives it follows Bruno, Bruno's son Miles, Miles' wife Diana and her sister Lisa, Bruno's son in law...
(1969)
- A Fairly Honourable Defeat
A Fairly Honourable Defeat is a novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch.-Plot summary:The lives of several friends are thrown into disarray by the machinations of Julius King...
(1970)
- An Accidental Man (1971)
- The Black Prince
The Black Prince is Iris Murdoch's 15th novel, first published in 1973. The name of the novel alludes mainly to Hamlet.-Plot summary:The Black Prince is remarkable for the structure of its narrative, consisting of a central story bookended by forewords and post-scripts by characters within it...
(1973), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
- The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), winner of the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction
- A Word Child
A Word Child is the 17th novel by Iris Murdoch.First published in 1975 by Chatto and Windus, A Word Child charts the trials and tribulations of the title character, the "word child", Hilary Burde as he attempts to recover his soul from the misery of his troubled past...
(1975)
- Henry and Cato (1976)
- The Sea, the Sea
The Sea, the Sea is the 19th novel by Iris Murdoch. It won the Booker Prize in 1978.-Plot summary:The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs...
(1978), winner of the Booker Prize
- Nuns and Soldiers
Nuns and Soldiers is a 1980 novel by Iris Murdoch. The setting is England and two of the main characters are Gertrude, a widow, and Anne, an ex-nun.- Plot :...
(1980)
- The Philosopher's Pupil
The Philosopher's Pupil is a 1983 novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. It is set in a small English spa town called Ennistone.-Main characters:...
(1983)
- The Good Apprentice
-Plot:Edward Baltram, a college student living in London, gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug for a joke. After Mark, still high, falls to his death from a window, Edward is wracked with guilt and depression — worsened by daily letters from Mark's mother...
(1985)
- The Book and the Brotherhood
The Book and the Brotherhood is the 23rd novel of Iris Murdoch, first published in 1987. Considered by some critics to be among her best novels, is the story of a group of close friends living in England in the 1980s. The book of the title is a theoretical work on Marxism, supposed to have been...
(1987)
- The Message to the Planet (1989)
- The Green Knight
The Green Knight is the 25th novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, first published in 1993.-Plot summary:The lives of Louise Anderson and her daughters Aleph, Sefton and Moy become intertwined with a mystical character whose destiny both affects and informs the novel's central...
(1993)
- Jackson's Dilemma
Jackson's Dilemma is a novel by Iris Murdoch published in 1995. It was Murdoch's last novel....
(1995)
- Something Special (Short story reprint, 1999; originally published 1957)
Philosophy
- Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
- The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
- The Fire and the Sun (1977)
- Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
as a Guide to Morals. (1992)
- Existentialists and Mystics
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. (1997)
Plays
- A Severed Head
A Severed Head is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch.Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilized and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle class people who are lucky to be free of...
(with J.B. Priestley, 1964)
- The Italian Girl
-Plot introduction:Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones...
(with James Saunders, 1969)
- The Three Arrows & The Servants and the Snow (1973)
- The Servants (1980)
- Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986)
- The Black Prince (1987)
Poetry collections
- A Year of Birds (1978; revised edition, 1984)
- Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997)
Secondary literature
- Journals - Articles on Iris Murdoch at philpapers
- Antonaccio, Maria (2000) Picturing the human: the moral thought of Iris Murdoch OUP. ISBN 0-19-516660-4
- Bayley, John (1999) Elegy for Iris. Picador. ISBN 0-312-25382-6
- Bayley, John (1998 ) Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. ISBN 0-7156-2848-8
- Bayley, John (1999) Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire. W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 0-393-32079-0
- Conradi, P.J.
Peter J. Conradi is a British author and academic.-Career:He is known as a biographer, having written Iris Murdoch: A Life, an official biography of his friend Iris Murdoch, and also a life of Angus Wilson...
(2001) Iris Murdoch: A Life. W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 0-393-04875-6
- Conradi, P.J.
Peter J. Conradi is a British author and academic.-Career:He is known as a biographer, having written Iris Murdoch: A Life, an official biography of his friend Iris Murdoch, and also a life of Angus Wilson...
(forward by Bayley, John) The Saint and the Artist. Macmillan 1986, HarperCollins 2001 ISBN 0-00-712019-2
- Dooley, Gillian (ed.) and Murdoch, Iris (ed.) (2003) From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations With Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press ISBN 1-57003-499-0
- Laverty, Megan (2007) Iris Murdoch's Ethics: A Consideration of Her Romantic Vision. Continuum Press ISBN 0-8264-8535-9.
- Widdows, Heather (2005) "The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch". Ashgate Press ISBN 0-7546-3625-9
- A.S. Byatt (1965) "Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch". Chatto & Windus
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