Iris Murdoch – A Life - Hardcover

Conradi, Peter J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048756 ISBN 13: 9780393048759

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001

Synopsis

In "Iris Murdoch," Peter Conradi assesses the remarkable intellectual and cultural legacy of the celebrated philosopher and beloved novelist. Depicting her personal life in extraordinary detail -- her student days at Oxford, her Communist activities, her early affairs, and her enduring marriage to John Bayley -- he also deftly interprets her philosophical works and twenty-six novels with brilliant clarity and insight. Murdoch emerges as a writer who in her early years imagined herself as the heir to George Eliot but later found a kinship with Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, his obsessions with sadomasochism, and his philosophical fascination with moral anarchy. Relying on ninety-five hitherto unseen diaries, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of letters, Conradi has written a riveting biography that is as much an absorbing history of literary England from 1940 to the present as it is a vivid depiction of one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.

About this title

Review:

In Iris: A Memoir, Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, charted in tender if often terrifying detail the writer and philosopher's final years battling against Alzheimer's Disease. Rather than duplicate Bayley, Peter Conradi's extensive and scholarly biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, wisely devotes the majority of its attention to exploring Murdoch's formative years. Conradi, a close friend whose dog was immortalised in one of Murdoch's novels, occasionally gets bogged down in minutia. (At one point he expends considerable energy and several footnotes discussing whether her prep school headmistress presented prizes with a wooden sword or a rolled-up piece of cardboard.) On the whole though his painstaking attention to detail pays immense dividends; reminding us of the sheer inventiveness of Murdoch's work revealing that her life was if anything "more improbably packed with strange coincidences than her plots".

Born into an unorthodox Irish Protestant family, she never lost her sense of being an outsider in England--a theme meditated upon in several of her finest novels. At Oxford University just before the Second World War she was a dedicated member of the Communist Party and an avowed bohemian. Stalin and a wartime spell in the civil service dimmed her commitment to Communism (in the 1980s she even voted Conservative) but she always remained a "free spirit". One former lover described her as being "monumentally unfaithful" and throughout her adult life she conducted numerous affairs with men and women. If her fictions sometimes presented interrelations of almost Shakespearean complexity, Murdoch's own trysts with Nobel Prizewinner Elias Canetti, the novelist Brigid Brophy and the philosopher Philippa Foot were no less dramatic. Later she praised monogamy, attacking the very promiscuity of her youth. Conradi acknowledges rather than condemns Murdoch's contradictions, presenting us with a fallible, mercurial human being--the inspiring college lecturer who was sometimes too wrapped up in her own problems to teach; the advocate of tolerance who could be censorious; the existentialist who questioned freedom as a value in morals and the novelist who sought critical approval and yet was nauseated by praise. --Travis Elborough

From the Back Cover:

Dame Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, played a major role in English life and letters for nearly half a century, and became an icon to a generation. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has great significance for our age, and the adjective 'Murdochian' has entered the language to describe a world of baroque coincidence and erotic imbroglio.

Iris 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 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. '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. Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960's, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distance and by letter, and the Buddist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393048756
• ISBN 13: 9780393048759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512