Iris Murdoch
original name in full Jean Iris
Murdoch, married name Mrs. John O. Bayley
born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland
died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire,
England
British novelist and philosopher noted
for her psychological novels that contain
philosophical and comic elements.
After an early childhood spent in London,
Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol,
and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville
College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she
worked in the British Treasury and then for
two years as an administrative officer with
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration. In 1948 she was elected a
fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Murdoch’s first published work was a
critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist
(1953). This was followed by two novels,
Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the
Enchanter (1956), that were admired for
their intelligence, wit, and high
seriousness. These qualities, along with a
rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing
the tensions and complexities in
sophisticated sexual relationships,
continued to distinguish her work. With what
is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958),
Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as
a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific
career with such novels as A Severed Head
(1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The
Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince
(1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the
Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s
Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985),
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The
Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green
Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel,
Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well
received; some critics attributed the
novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease
with which she had been diagnosed in 1994.
Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley,
chronicled her struggle with the disease in
his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999).
Murdoch’s novels typically have
convoluted plots in which innumerable
characters representing different
philosophical positions undergo
kaleidoscopic changes in their relations
with each other. Realistic observations of
20th-century life among middle-class
professionals are interwoven with
extraordinary incidents that partake of the
macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly
comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s
conviction that although human beings think
they are free to exercise rational control
over their lives and behaviour, they are
actually at the mercy of the unconscious
mind, the determining effects of society at
large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In
addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote
plays, verse, and works of philosophy and
literary criticism.
