Under the Net (1954)
Debut novel: picaresque comedy of the struggling writer Jake Donaghue in London and Paris
Literature · Novelists
Iris Murdoch
1919–1999 · Irish-born British
Philosophical novel
Dame Iris Murdoch was a Dublin-born novelist and Oxford moral philosopher who wrote 26 novels mixing intricate, often comic love entanglements with questions of goodness, freedom and power. She won the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea (1978), and her decline into Alzheimer's disease was movingly described by her husband John Bayley and dramatised in the film Iris.
How to spot them
- ▸Oxford philosopher-novelist; The Sovereignty of Good
- ▸Booker Prize 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, narrated by retired theatre director Charles Arrowby
- ▸Husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris; film Iris with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet
- ▸Debut Under the Net with Jake Donaghue; a lay community at Imber Court in The Bell
Key works
The Bell (1958)
A lay religious community beside Imber Abbey and the raising of an old bell from a lake
A Severed Head (1961)
Comedy of rapidly shifting partners around wine merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon
The Black Prince (1973)
Writer Bradley Pearson's obsessive love, framed by editorial postscripts; won the James Tait Black Prize
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)
A psychotherapist torn between wife and mistress; won the Whitbread Novel Award
The Sea, the Sea (1978)
Booker winner: retired theatre director Charles Arrowby retreats to the coast and fixates on a lost first love
The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
Philosophical essays arguing that moral life depends on attention to reality and to others
Key ideas
- Morality as 'unselfing': seeing others and the world clearly through loving attention
- Drew on Plato, Simone Weil and a critique of existentialism; her first book was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
- Her novels often turn on a charismatic 'enchanter' figure who dominates those around them
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Dublin in 1919 and brought up in London; studied at Somerville College, Oxford
- •Worked for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) after the Second World War
- •Taught philosophy as a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford
- •Married the literary critic John Bayley in 1956
- •Appointed Dame (DBE) in 1987
- •Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma (1995), was written as Alzheimer's disease began to affect her
- •Died in Oxford in February 1999
- •The 2001 film Iris starred Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as the older and younger Murdoch
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Sources
- Peter J. Conradi — Iris Murdoch: A Life
- John Bayley — Elegy for Iris