DAME IRIS MURDOCH, who died in 1999, played a major role in English life and letters for nearly half a century. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has great significance for our age. Murdoch’s life – like her books – was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley’s doctrine that, for a writer, ‘it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters,’ and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself ‘must not distinguish between me and my work’. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation, but much that was thought to be romance in her novels turns out to be realism. ‘Real life is so much odder than any book,’ she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. In books such as The Bell, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Black Prince and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch introduced a new moral seriousness to the English novel, and her philosophical works established her as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century.
Peter Conradi, who knew her well, has had unrestricted access to a vast range of her journals, letters and papers, as well as to her own and her friends’ recollections. This is not just an extraordinarily full and illuminating biography, but a superb history of a generation that has profoundly influenced our world today.
Peter Conradi is English Professor Emeritus at the University of Kingston and an Honorary Fellow at University College London. His books include critical studies of the novels of Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Dostoevsky and Angus Wilson, and a co-edited collection, with Stoddard Martin, Cold War, Common Pursuit: British Council Lecturers in Poland, 1938–98. He was a friend of Dame Iris Murdoch’s and edited her Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Literature and Philosophy. He lives in London and in Radnorshire.
Iris Murdoch: A Life was chosen as a Book of the Year by Paul Binding (Times Literary Supplement), Anne Chisholm (Sunday Telegraph), Margaret Drabble (Guardian), P.D.James (Independent), Tim Page (Washington Post), Miranda Seymour (Sunday Times), Hilary Spurling (Daily Telegraph), the Evening Standard and the Scotsman.
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‘This book fulfils the purpose of literary biography – to illuminate the subject’s work…Conradi has succeeded in showing the reader how often, and how deeply, Iris Murdoch’s seemingly fantastic plots and characters are true to life’
ANNE CHISHOLM, Sunday Telegraph
‘[This] splendid new biography…is a marvel of sympathy and intelligence. [Conradi] brings the rarefied milieux of Oxford and Cambridge to vivid life, with thumbnail sketches of some of the finest writers and thinkers in post-war England’
TIM PAGE, Washington Post
‘A biography that is both admiring and judicious and that gradually draws you in to the colourful and peculiar world Murdoch inhabited…an observant, delicate and almost complete picture of a woman whose books define her class and time’ CLAIRE HARMAN, Evening Standard
‘The book offers not just the story of Iris Murdoch but also a wonderful view of most of a century and its shifting social and political sympathies…Conradi is the best kind of biographer…a scrupulously thorough researcher and a graceful stylist’ BRIAN MCFARLANE, Sydney Morning Herald
‘Intellectually, she is now, thanks to Conradi’s work on her early years, more easily placed… [His] greatest achievement in this book is so successfully to set the strange circumstances of her life and character against this intellectual background’
BRYAN APPLEYARD, New Statesman
‘Peter Conradi’s book is a rich and affectionate but levelheaded account of her life’ DERWENT MAY, The Times
‘Peter Conradi is an acute and expert reader of both Iris Murdoch and of her art’ KATHRYN HUGHES, Independent
‘This is a monumental book. It is also a good read. Peter Conradi is adept at making a coherent story…A new edition of The Saint and the Artist, Conradi’s study of the novels, has also appeared. The most important insight of both books is Iris’s obsession with power and its possible evils’
MARY WARNOCK, Oxford Today
‘[Conradi] has uncovered a vast amount of information about her life that has surprised even those closest to her’
ELAINE sHOWALTER, Chronicle of Higher Education
‘The triumph of this magisterial biography is that…different aspects are unified into a coherent view…outstanding in its depth of research, command of complicated evidence and portrayal of social context’ Good Book Guide
‘Conradi shows us Murdoch in the making and the making of Murdoch…the whole range and riches of her mind are charted here…this book succeeds admirably in capturing the many Murdochs…exhaustively researched, sends you back, with increased understanding and interest, to the work’
NIALL MACMONAGLE, Irish Times
‘Conradi is tremendously good at ambience…He is also a dab hand at comedy… [He] delivers passages of narrative that are as gripping as the best of Murdoch’s novels…[his] feat is to make her seem even stranger than her fiction’
HUMPHREY CARPENTER, Sunday Times