Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch (born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland—died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) was an Irish-born British novelist and philosopher noted for her psychological novels that contain philosophical and comic elements. Her novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Murdoch once said of her creative approach, “I invent the whole thing before I start writing. Even the conversations are in my head. I don’t start writing the thing until I’ve got the whole of it absolutely.” She also wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism.

Background, education, and marriage

Born in Dublin to Wills John Hughes Murdoch, a civil servant, and Irene Alice (née Richardson) Murdoch, a trained opera singer, Iris and her family moved to London when she was an infant. She retained a strong Irish identity, even for a time referring to herself as “Anglo-Irish,” a term that suggests she belonged to the landowning Protestant Ascendancy. In reality, her family was lower-middle class and had not been estate owners for centuries.

Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 she studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she began a brief flirtation with communism; because of this affiliation, she was denied a visa to study in the United States. 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, where she taught philosophy until 1963.

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Known for having a complex love life, Murdoch was engaged to poet and anthropologist Franz Steiner (he died of heart disease in 1952) and had affairs with fellow writers Elias Canetti and Brigid Brophy. In 1956 she married novelist John Bayley. They had no children and had a long and happy marriage that was also non-monogamous.

Novels and themes

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. Set among an Anglican lay community attached to a Benedictine convent, the novel examines morality, sex, religion, and the nature of good and evil.

She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), which explores themes of incest and infidelity; The Unicorn (1963), a Gothic romance set in western Ireland; The Red and the Green (1965), another Irish-themed story that takes place during the week leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising; and The Nice and the Good (1968), a murder mystery that doubles as a work of moral philosophy (some critics dismissed it as pretentious). Murdoch received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973), which centers on a middle-aged Shakespeare critic and failed novelist who begins a sexual relationship with the teenage daughter of his rival and former student, a best-selling writer. The title alludes to Hamlet, the complicated Freudian dynamics of which permeate the novel’s plot. Henry and Cato (1976) follows the friendship between an art historian and a Roman Catholic convert and priest.

Characteristic of Murdoch’s works are their realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate her conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behavior, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces.

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With The Sea, the Sea (1978), Murdoch won the Booker Prize. The novel follows a film director and playwright who retires from London to an isolated house by the sea to spend the rest of his life in quiet contemplation and to write his memoirs. As he writes, figures from his past and present, some invited, descend upon his coastal retreat. Like The Black Prince, the story’s themes show the influence of Shakespeare, albeit this time that of The Tempest.

Later works and death

Murdoch continued to be prolific, publishing a new novel nearly every other year, including 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). Among her later works of philosophy are the highly influential The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).

In 1987 Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Her 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. She died in 1999 at age 79.

John Bayley chronicled his wife’s struggle with Alzheimer’s in Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998; U.S. title Elegy for Iris), which was adapted as the film Iris in 2001. He published two more memoirs in the Iris Trilogy: Iris and the Friends (1999) and Widower’s House (2001). A selection of Murdoch’s voluminous correspondence was published as Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 (2016). Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995 (2026) is a collection of previously unpublished verse that was discovered in the attic of Murdoch and Bayley’s home in Oxford a year after Bayley’s death in 2015.