The works of the novelist and philosopher Jean Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) portray characters whose warped and often dreamlike perceptions of reality create suffering among those whose lives they attempt to dominate. Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin,...

One of the prominent writers of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch has published twenty-six novels, five philosophical books, five plays, a book of poetry, and most recently two edited volumes of previously uncollected work--another book of...

One of the dominant figures of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch continues to divide the critics; for example, one of the professors of English at Cambridge University, Frank Kermode, thinks highly of her work, while another, Christopher Ricks,...

Murdoch, Iris(1919–1999) Iris Murdoch is best known to the world as a novelist—she wrote twenty-six—but she was a tutor in philosophy at Oxford University from 1948 until 1963 and wrote several influential essays on moral...

Philosopher and novelist (Jean) Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 15 and educated at St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she also taught from 1948 to 1963. She won the 1978 Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, The...

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was a Dublin-born writer and philosopher, best known for her novels, which combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines, usually involving ethical or sexual themes. Her first...

Iris Murdoch: A Life Peter J. Conradi. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001 Suffering from Alzheimer's disease, Iris Murdoch died in England in 1999. Thanks to the memoir of her widower, John Bayley, and to the film, Iris, adapted from it, these...

Iris Murdoch: A Life. By Peter J. Conradi. Norton, 706 pp., $35.00. WHEN IRIS MURDOCH died in 1999, Harold Bloom, custodian of the literary canon, proclaimed that there were no serious writers left in Britain. John Updike calls her the preeminent English...

Contemplating a second home in Florida? Struggling to decide between frowzy Palm Beach and freaky Miami Beach? Let me add to your confusion.My husband Jonathan Adler and I spent last week in Florida, commuting back and forward between Palm Beach and Miami Beach. We are...

Of her twenty novels, Iris Murdoch has written six in the first person, each one using a male narrator…. [One] cannot help wondering if her continual use of a male narrator amounts to another woman writer's surrendering her pen to the authority of the male novelist. As far as Murdoch herself is concerned this would seem to be the case. While she has declared that she does not find "much difference between men and women," she also claims a male viewpoint for much the same reason t...

Form, Iris Murdoch warns, is the artist's consolation and his temptation: he is tempted to sacrifice the eccentric, contingent individual while he consoles himself with the secure boundaries of structure. As she sees it, this constitutes a crisis since the contemporary novelist tends to produce fiction in the shape of tiny, self-contained, crystal-like objects. Diagnosing the tyranny of form as an ill that must be cured, she postulates a return to the novel of character as it is manifested in the wor...

Iris Murdoch's waifs, orphans, refugees, demons, and saints, all share a common isolation, a loss of community, and the absence of close relationship to "a rich and complicated" group from which as moral beings they should have much to learn. As a philosopher, Murdoch connects this loss of community to the inadequacies of existentialist and empirical thought that rely on self-centered standards of individual consciousness and sincerity, rather than on other-centered values of virtue, lo...