Profile of Iris Murdoch on Famous Like Me

Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (July 15, 1919 – February 8, 1999) was an Anglo–Irish writer and philosopher, best known for her novels, which combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines, usually involving ethical or sexual themes.

Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Murdoch was the focus of Richard Eyre's biopic, Iris, which told the story of her decline into Alzheimer's disease through the eyes of her husband, John Bayley.

Biography

Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland. She read classics, ancient history, and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein. 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, including the first study in English of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was at Oxford in 1956 that she met and married 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, which she at first attributed to writer's block.

Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired actor who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart.

In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Novels

Murdoch was strongly influenced by Plato, Freud and Sartre. Her novels are by turns intense and bizarre, filled with dark humor and unpredictable plot twists, undercutting the civilized surface of the usually upper-class milieu in which her characters are observed. She often included atypical gay characters in her fiction, most notably in The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). She also frequently wrote about a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters — a type of man Murdoch is said to have modeled on her lover, the Nobel laureate, Elias Canetti.

Although she wrote primarily in a realistic manner, on occasion Murdoch would introduce ambiguity into her work through a sometimes misleading use of symbolism, and by mixing elements of fantasy within her precisely described scenes. The Unicorn (1963) can be read and enjoyed as a sophisticated Gothic romance, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a brilliant parody of the Gothic mode of writing. The Black Prince (1973) is a remarkable study of erotic obsession, 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.

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. Priestley dramatized her 1961 novel, A Severed Head, which was directed by Richard Attenborough in 1971, and starred Ian Holm. Richard Eyre's film, Iris (2001), based on her husband's memoir of his wife as she developed Alzheimer's disease, following her death in 1999. The film starred Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet respectively as the old and young Murdoch.

Criticism

Murdoch was criticized in 2003 by the British writer A.N. Wilson in his Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a book described by The Guardian as "mischievously revelatory" and "quite spectacularly rude," and described by Wilson himself as an "anti-biography," in which he wrote of her promiscuity and disloyalty, that she "thrived on acts of betrayal", was cruel, and was "prepared to go to bed with almost anyone", (Wilson 2003).

Bibliography

Fiction

• Under the Net (1954)
• The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)
• The Sandcastle (1957)
• The Bell (1958)
• A Severed Head (1961)
• An Unofficial Rose (1962)
• The Unicorn (1963)
• The Italian Girl (1964)
• The Red and the Green (1965)
• The Time of the Angels (1966)
• The Nice and the Good (1968)
• Bruno's Dream (1969)
• A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970)
• An Accidental Man (1971)
• The Black Prince (1973)
• The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)
• A Word Child (1975)
• Henry and Cato (1976)
• The Sea, the Sea (1978), winner of the Booker Prize
• Nuns and Soldiers (1980)
• The Philosopher's Pupil (1983)
• The Good Apprentice (1985)
• The Book and the Brotherhood (1987)
• The Message to the Planet (1989)
• The Green Knight (1993)
• Jackson's Dilemma (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)
• Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986)
• Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)
• Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

Plays

• A Severed Head (with J.B. Priestly, 1964)
• The Italian Girl (with James Saunders, 1969)
• The Three Arrows & The Servants and the Snow (1973)
• The Black Prince (1987)

Poetry

• A Year of Birds (1978; revised edition, 1984)
• Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997)

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