Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)
Author of The Sea, the Sea
About the Author
Iris Murdoch was one of the twentieth century's most prominent novelists, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea. She died in 1999. (Publisher Provided) Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 15, 1919. She was educated at Badminton School in Bristol and Oxford University, where she read show more classics, ancient history, and philosophy. After several government jobs, she returned to academic life, studying philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948, she became a fellow and tutor at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She also taught at the Royal College of Art in London. A professional philosopher, she began writing novels as a hobby, but quickly established herself as a genuine literary talent. She wrote over 25 novels during her lifetime including Under the Net, A Severed Head, The Unicorn, and Of the Nice and the Good. She won several awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince in 1973 and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978. She died on February 8, 1999 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: © Steve Pyke 1990 (use of image requires permission from Steve Pyke)
Works by Iris Murdoch
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Based upon the Romanes Lecture (Oxford Paperbacks) (1977) 117 copies
The Novels of Iris Murdoch Volume Two: The Flight from the Enchanter, The Red and the Green, and The Time of the Angels (2018) 9 copies
The Novels of Iris Murdoch Volume One: Henry and Cato, The Italian Girl, and The Philosopher's Pupil (2018) 9 copies
The Novels of Iris Murdoch Volume Three: A Word Child, An Unofficial Rose, and Bruno's Dream (2018) 6 copies
La salvación por las palabras : ¿puede la literatura curarnos de los males de la filosofía? (2014) 6 copies
O Sino 4 copies
Canterburyjske priče 4 copies
Hoe bewijs ik het bestaan van God 2 copies
Unicórnio 1 copy
Ο Μαύρος Πρίγκηπας 1 copy
Een filosofie van de liefde 1 copy
Henry e Cato 1 copy
Przypadkowy cz¿owiek 1 copy
İTALYAN KIZI 1 copy
Tilfælghedens spil 1 copy
[Notebook : 34 pages occupied with lists of words in Russian with their English translations] 1 copy
[Make a joyful noise Vol. 2] 1 copy
[Make a joyful noise Vol. 1] 1 copy
Hver tar sin 1 copy
Murdoch, Iris Archive 1 copy
Against Dryness 1 copy
Os Olhos da Aranha Livro 1 1 copy
Çan 1 copy
Сочинения в 3-Х томах 1 copy
Associated Works
Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (1997) — Contributor — 35 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Murdoch, Dame Jean Iris
- Other names
- Murdoch, Jean Iris
- Birthdate
- 1919-07-15
- Date of death
- 1999-02-08
- Burial location
- Ashes scattered in the garden of Oxford Crematorium
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Ireland
- Birthplace
- Dublin, Ireland
- Place of death
- Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Cause of death
- Alzheimer's disease
- Places of residence
- Dublin, Ireland
London, England, UK
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK - Education
- Oxford University (BA|1942|Somerville College)
University of Cambridge (Newnham College)
Badminton School, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, UK - Occupations
- novelist
philosopher - Relationships
- Bayley, John (husband)
- Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary, Literature | 1975)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Honorary Member | 1982)
St Anne's College, Oxford University - Awards and honors
- Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature
Order of the British Empire (Dame Commander ∙ 1987)
Golden PEN Award (1997)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Man Booker Prize - Agent
- Ed Victor
- Short biography
- Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, the only child of an Anglo-Irish family. When she was a baby, the family moved to London, where her father worked as a civil servant. She attended the Badminton School as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938, she enrolled at Oxford University, where she read Classics. She graduated with a First Class Honors degree in 1942 and got a job with the Treasury. In 1944, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working in Brussels, Innsbruck, and Graz for two years. She then returned to her studies and became a postgraduate at Cambridge University. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. In 1956, she married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and English professor at Oxford. She published her debut novel, Under the Net, in 1954 and went on to produce 25 more novels and additional acclaimed works of philosophy, poetry and drama. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and named a Dame Commander of Order of the British Empire in 1987. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died two years later.
Members
Discussions
Group Read, June 2022: The Sea, the Sea in 1001 Books to read before you die (July 2022)
Group Read, July 2018: Under The Net in 1001 Books to read before you die (July 2018)
The Bell in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2018)
Musing on Murdoch in General in Iris Murdoch readers (October 2017)
The Nice and the Good in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2017)
The Italian Girl in Iris Murdoch readers (November 2015)
The Sea, the Sea in Iris Murdoch readers (September 2015)
The Sandcastle in Iris Murdoch readers (January 2015)
The Green Knight in Iris Murdoch readers (May 2014)
The Unicorn in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2014)
***Group Read, October 2013: The Bell by Iris Murdoch in 1001 Books to read before you die (October 2013)
The Book and the Brotherhood in Iris Murdoch readers (October 2013)
A Severed Head in Iris Murdoch readers (May 2013)
The Black Prince in Iris Murdoch readers (May 2013)
The Philosopher's Pupil in Iris Murdoch readers (April 2013)
The Good Apprentice in Iris Murdoch readers (March 2013)
Something Special in Iris Murdoch readers (March 2013)
Henry and Cato in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2013)
A Word Child in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2013)
Bruno's Dream in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2013)
An Unofficial Rose in Iris Murdoch readers (February 2013)
Henry Cato in Iris Murdoch readers (January 2013)
Murdoch & Mayhem in 75 Books Challenge for 2012 (December 2012)
Reviews
Another Iris Murdoch book, with many of the usual themes - a curious collection of people fall in and out of love and get into some unlikely situations. There is a lot of hand-wringing about religion and loss of faith, as well as about an unexpected inheritance and the characters are on the whole quite an endearing bunch.
There is something about Iris Murdoch's novels that haunts me in a rather profound way. It has to do with being British. At the time of writing this, it has been 196 years since my ancestors left South West England to push out to Australia, and this sense of separation from the motherland is a strange, raspberry-coloured strain of my personality. I am not English, but I relate to that culture more than to any other (aside from my own Australian one). So when I read "The Bell", sixty years after its publication, I am struck by how familiar and yet eerily unfamiliar everyone feels. I understand what is being said, and what the characters are feeling, but at the same time I really, really don't. What I mean is - it's not just time. When I read Australian novels from the 1950s, I get the characters in a way that I don't entirely get these ones. Most people are thicketed by their culture (to use a Murdochian word) to the extent that it bursts out of them without realising it. Turns of phrase, implications of word choice, what we see and hear and what we feel.
All of which is to say that Murdoch's novels might be more descriptive than I would like in the twentieth century (very Zola), her characters prone to outbursts with origins I can't fully comprehend, and her sense of plot sometimes grinding mercilessly over her forever maudlin figures, trapped in an aspic-like web of memory (in How Fiction Works, James Wood paints Murdoch as a "poignant figure" because - as she herself admitted - she could never create fully psychologically independent characters, like Shakespeare could, but instead despite her best efforts, her characters were in some ways extensions of herself), but what distances me from the novel most is a sense that I'm not quite with the characters in this lay religious community.
In spite of all this, it might actually be impossible to get bored during a Murdoch novel. She weaves around you. She might be - as Wood argues - rehashing nineteenth-century styles and ideas with a twentieth-century melodrama facade, but I still think she's pretty damn good, and I'm haunted by that bell. As I wrote in my rather underwhelmed review of The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch was prolific, one of the last survivors of an age when "literary" writers could churn out stories without undue pressure that every work had to be a masterpiece. I don't actually expect every book to be a masterpiece, and I would much rather we return to a mentality when we can just enjoy works, great or minor, as stories.
Which is a needlessly lengthy way of saying that I enjoyed the book, I didn't love the book, I'm intrigued by Murdoch's characters, I'm disconnected from her characters, I'm haunted by that bell, and I also think that people whose lives are so fixated on a church bell need to consider other avenues of intellectual stimulation. That's clear, right?… (more)
All of which is to say that Murdoch's novels might be more descriptive than I would like in the twentieth century (very Zola), her characters prone to outbursts with origins I can't fully comprehend, and her sense of plot sometimes grinding mercilessly over her forever maudlin figures, trapped in an aspic-like web of memory (in How Fiction Works, James Wood paints Murdoch as a "poignant figure" because - as she herself admitted - she could never create fully psychologically independent characters, like Shakespeare could, but instead despite her best efforts, her characters were in some ways extensions of herself), but what distances me from the novel most is a sense that I'm not quite with the characters in this lay religious community.
In spite of all this, it might actually be impossible to get bored during a Murdoch novel. She weaves around you. She might be - as Wood argues - rehashing nineteenth-century styles and ideas with a twentieth-century melodrama facade, but I still think she's pretty damn good, and I'm haunted by that bell. As I wrote in my rather underwhelmed review of The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch was prolific, one of the last survivors of an age when "literary" writers could churn out stories without undue pressure that every work had to be a masterpiece. I don't actually expect every book to be a masterpiece, and I would much rather we return to a mentality when we can just enjoy works, great or minor, as stories.
Which is a needlessly lengthy way of saying that I enjoyed the book, I didn't love the book, I'm intrigued by Murdoch's characters, I'm disconnected from her characters, I'm haunted by that bell, and I also think that people whose lives are so fixated on a church bell need to consider other avenues of intellectual stimulation. That's clear, right?… (more)
Iris Murdoch was a true 20th century great.
From a 1975 review published in Kirkus:
"There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch's plots: it's not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man's wife--an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar's second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne's death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity--in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary's compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered."… (more)
From a 1975 review published in Kirkus:
"There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch's plots: it's not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man's wife--an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar's second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne's death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity--in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary's compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered."… (more)
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Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 86
- Also by
- 10
- Members
- 26,178
- Popularity
- #799
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 564
- ISBNs
- 692
- Languages
- 25
- Favorited
- 138
Iris Murdoch's debut novel is a disconcerting, shabby picaresque novel following the young hack writer Jake Donahue through a series of adventures. For the most part, it falls into my particular favourite type of picaresque: the adventure novel largely set over a few days. Murdoch is already comfortably inhabiting the body of a downtrodden, almost-broken, deeply strange protagonist, whose voice we can never entirely trust (Jake is keen to narrate his own story - a little too keen), and whose world seems to be a series of set-pieces that emerge out of otherwise ordinary life.
What is the plot? This is the kind of novel where certain literary snobs would say "the plot doesn't matter" but, reader, do not listen to them. In this case, the plot is precisely point. In a nutshell: Jake is kicked out by a woman, goes fawning back to two actress sisters from his past, uncovers a potential conspiracy involving a screenplay secretly adapted from a translation of a French novel he wrote some time ago, goes on a mad pub crawl with his gadabout mates, steals a film star dog who subsequently saves him from a police raid in the aftermath of a socialist party riot amidst an Ancient Roman film set in the middle of London, is mistaken for an escaped mental patient by an alley full of suburban gossips, pursues his lady love through Paris on Bastille Day, takes an unexpected job as a hospital orderly where his doubts and concerns come back to haunt him during a daring midnight visit to an incapacitated friend, and must consider whether he will position himself high(brow) or low on the unsteady rope ladder that is a literary career - or whether he even has the chops to climb the ladder at all. Throw in some Plato and a dash of Wittgenstein, a starling invasion straight out of Hitchcock's The Birds, and an avant-garde mime theatre, and you have Under the Net.
Murdoch's novel, first published in 1957, seems to sit quite comfortably within the (poorly named) 'Angry Young Man' cultural epoch - although Jake is not so much a victim of society as a personal exploration of those who exist comfortably in the margins. He has never held a job aside from writing until he signs up as an orderly, and is impressed by how easily he gets this one given how much his friends complain about the process. ("You will point out, and quite rightly", Jake says in one of Murdoch's moments of wry hilarity, that hospital orderly is perhaps a job where supply eclipses demand, "whereas what my friends were finding it so difficult to become was higher civil servants, columnists of the London dailies, officials of the British Council, fellows of colleges, or governors of the BBC. That is true.") Whereas her fellow novelists were interested in the temporal, Murdoch constantly allows us to see the metaphysical moments, the sublime and the ridiculous. But she is not writing, contrary to the philosophers who want to claim this text as their own, about what lies beyond the plot; Murdoch is finding the sublime within what is taking place, within human interaction and yearning.
And there is so much yearning. Although we have reason to doubt some of Jake's suspicions very early, he is a man easily compelled to new feeling: sudden love, sudden self-doubt, convinced he has destroyed a friendship or is under attack from the slightest of impulses. He is a fascinating character and, while I might concede that I'm not sure Murdoch entirely captures what it is like to be a male, the fulcrum around which her fairytale-like world rotates. (On a more terrestrial note, how times have changed - Jake tells us on the first page that his friend-cum-assistant Finn usually waits for him in bed, and later spends much of the book deeply pining for an old friend named Hugo. I had to separate myself entirely from 2020 to see these as the perfectly normal actions of a sensitive and impoverished heterosexual man!)
It is clear that one of my great projects for the 2020s will be to read all twenty-six of Murdoch's novels in order. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the pitch-perfect Samuel West, and I heartily recommend it for the way that West teases out both the uproarious comedy and the more delicate variety, yet I found myself returning to my copy of the book often to reread paragraphs or phrases just to let the author wash over me. I suspect that, structurally, or literarily, Under the Net is not one of Murdoch's greatest novels. (As her debut, it hardly could be!) But clearly from the Top 100 lists it frequently appears on, the novel has a place in the heart of many writers, and is perhaps an easier access point to her oeuvre than most.
Such fun.… (more)