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 | | | Portrait: Dame Iris Murdoch by Tom Phillips, 1985. Â (source) |
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Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999)
Category: Irish Literature Born: July 15, 1919
Dublin, Ireland Died: February 8, 1999
Oxford, England
Related authors:
E. M. Forster, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Miller, J. D. Salinger, Michel de Montaigne, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, William Shakespeare
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| 7/15/1919 |
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Attending to Iris Murdoch
On this day in 1919, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin. Many of Murdoch's twenty-six novels present the horrors of modern egomania, so given the chance she may not have enjoyed all the attention that her life has received since her death in 1999: her husband, John Bayley's, Elegy for Iris and Iris and her Friends; Peter Conradi's authorized biography, Iris Murdoch; and the Oscar-nominated movie, Iris. |
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Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
by Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi, George Steiner
non-fiction, essays |
Henry and Cato
fiction |
Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals
non-fiction, essays |
The Bell
fiction |
The Book and the Brotherhood
fiction |
The Green Night
fiction |
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
fiction |
The Sea, The Sea
fiction |
The Severed Head
fiction |
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FIND BOOKS BY IRIS MURDOCH
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"Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch"
A 1978 article by Joyce Carol Oates examines themes and characters in The Sea, The Sea, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Henry and Cato, The Nice and the Good, The Time of the Angels, and other works.
"Given the opportunity to experience freedom we prefer to be, in the end, puppets of God. The work that is central to an understanding of Murdoch's oeuvre is Plato's allegory of the cave: I suggest that all of Murdoch's novels are commentaries on it." |  | Guardian Unlimited
Find biographical information on the author's life and works, an interview, Murdoch's obituary, and a review of Peter J Conradi's recent biography.
"She was not the heir -- as she early and wrongly imagined -- to George Eliot, but to Dostoevsky, with his fantastic realism, his hectically compressed time-schemes, his obsessions with sado-masochism and with incipient moral anarchy. Her best novels combine Dostoevsky with Shakespearian romance and love-comedy." | | Art and Culture Network
Offers a brief overview of her life, novels, and themes, with recommended links.
"Iris Murdoch's fiction has a way of exposing fears and insecurities; suspense and an impending sense of death drive the plots of many of her novels. Dark, uncontrollable forces are abroad in her world, and keep her readers shifting, looking over their shoulders, and counting the shadows on the wall." | | BBC Interviews
An interview in which the author discusses when she started writing, the idea of "the well told story" as the heart of the novel, the nature of story with reference to Treasure Island, the theme of accident in her novel Accident, and the extent to which her novels are driven by philosophy.
"A lot of the energy which produces these novels is concerned with some sort of theoretical passion, some sort of worry which has got a theoretical form.... I have a horror of writing philosophical novels in a full theoretical sense, where the philosophy is really sticking out or weighing down on the thing. I think this would destroy one's ability to tell a good story and one's ability to create character, which is very much more what I want to do than produce theoretical explanations of the world." | | Resources on the Web
An annotated index of links to information and commentary about the author's life, novels and derivative works (including recent films), and personal philosophy, political activism, Also offers a timeline of significant events in the author's life, and criticism of selected works. | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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