Murdoch iris

Biography

Iris Murdoch was born with Dublin, Ireland, on July 15th, 1919. His/her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a family presbytérienne stockbreeders of sheep of County Down (close to Belfast), and his/her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who had had a training of singer, was of a Protestant family of Dublin. During the youth of Iris, his/her parents move in London where his/her father becomes civil servant. Iris studies the traditional ones, the old story and philosophy with Somerville College, Oxford, then philosophy with Newnham College, Cambridge, where it has in particular as professor Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1948, it becomes teaching with St Anne' S College, Oxford.

She writes its first novel, Under The Net , in 1954, after having published several philosophical tests and the first study in English devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre. In Oxford, in 1956, it meets and marries John Bayley, professor of English literature and also novelist. She will write 25 more other novels, as well as other studies and plays, up to 1995, where she starts to undergo the effects of the disease of Alzheimer. She dies in 1999 79 years old.

Novels

Murdoch was strongly influenced by Plato, Freud and Sartre. Its novels are alternatively intense and strange, full with black humor and unforeseeable reversals of the intrigue, digging under the civilized surface of the higher social class where its characters are located. She included frequently “gay” characters not stereotyped in her books, in particular in The Bell (1958) and has Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). She also frequently described a male character of an almost démoniaque power, which imposes its will to the other characters, and for which she is her supposed to have taken as model lover, the writer Elias Canetti.

Although having written initially in a realistic way, Murdoch introduces sometimes a certain ambiguity into its writing through a sometimes misleading use of symbolism, and while mixing with the imaginary elements with the precisely described scenes. The Unicorn (1963) can be read like a “Roman Gothic” sophisticated, or like a novel containing of the Gothic traps, or perhaps still a brilliant parody in this manner of writing. The Black Prince (1973) is a remarkable study of erotic obsession, the text becoming more complex, and lending itself to multiple interpretations, when supporting characters come to contradict the narrator and the mysterious `editor' of the book in a series of postfaces.

Iris Murdoch obtained the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a novel finely analyzed on the capacity of the love and the loss, having for hero an actor withdrawn of the scene and invaded by the jealousy when it again meets the being loved after several decades of separation.

External bonds

The Iris Murdoch Society
Card “Books & Writers”
The Centers for Iris Murdoch Studies

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