Biography Essay

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, has reviewed it extremely unfavorably. But she has forestalled some of the critics, at least on the crucial issue of the quantity against the quality of her output. Reviewing Sartre's Being and Nothingness in 1957, she concluded with these rather prophetic words: "writers of brief and meticulous articles will always look askance at writers of large, unrigorous, emotional volumes; but the latter, for better or worse, have the last word." She had herself by then published two novels (Under the Net, 1954, and The Flight from the Enchanter, 1956), a monograph, and a handful of philosophical articles. Some thirty-five years and almost as many books later, she herself has become, in...