Iris Murdoch

If you’re a bookish type of a certain age, chances are you went through your Iris Murdoch period. You binged on novels such as The Black Prince (1973) and The Sea, The Sea (1978); you immersed yourself in her world of perplexed, agonised souls searching for meaning, falling disastrously in love with absurdly wrong people, consoling themselves with a swim or a madrigal singalong. It’s less likely that you will have read any of her philosophical writings, but you were in awe of her mind, and her eventual eclipse by Alzheimer’s seemed like a particularly cruel blow. Your impression of her is probably of a brilliant, absent-minded professor who looked like Judi Dench.

Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.