Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher.
28 Facts About Iris Murdoch
2.
Iris Murdoch's first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
3.
Iris Murdoch was married for 43 years, until her death, to the literary critic and author John Bayley.
4.
Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of Irene Alice and Wills John Hughes Iris Murdoch.
5.
Iris Murdoch's mother had trained as a singer before Iris was born, and was from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin.
6.
Iris Murdoch was a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch.
7.
Iris Murdoch was brought up in Chiswick and educated in progressive independent schools, entering the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925 and attending Badminton School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938.
8.
Iris Murdoch was awarded a first-class honours degree in 1942.
9.
From 1947 to 1948, Iris Murdoch studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge.
10.
Iris Murdoch met Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge but did not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrived.
11.
In 1956, Iris Murdoch married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954.
12.
Iris Murdoch had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English.
13.
Iris Murdoch went on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama.
14.
Iris Murdoch was awarded honorary degrees by Durham University, the University of Bath, University of Cambridge and Kingston University, among others.
15.
Iris Murdoch was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982.
16.
Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died in 1999 in Oxford.
17.
Iris Murdoch sent copies of her earlier novels to Anscombe, but there is nothing in Anscombe's writing which reflects any of these.
18.
From this perspective, Iris Murdoch's work offers perceptive criticism of Kant, Sartre and Wittgenstein.
19.
Iris Murdoch gives herself exercises in vision: where she is inclined to say 'coarse,' she will say, and see, 'spontaneous.
20.
The Black Prince, for which Iris Murdoch won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, is a study of erotic obsession, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious "editor" of the book in a series of afterwords.
21.
Iris Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired stage director who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart.
22.
An authorised collection of her poetic writings, Poems by Iris Murdoch, appeared in 1997, edited by Paul Hullah and Yozo Muroya.
23.
Iris Murdoch did praise Murdoch's comic set pieces, and her portrayal of self-deceit.
24.
Iris Murdoch won a scholarship to study at Vassar College in the US in 1946, but was refused a visa because she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938, while a student at Oxford.
25.
Iris Murdoch left the party in 1942, when she went to work at the Treasury, but remained sympathetic to communism for several years.
26.
Conradi notes record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in The Red and the Green, and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978.
27.
Iris Murdoch recalled his personal encounters with Murdoch in Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me.
28.
David Morgan met Iris Murdoch in 1964, when he was a student at the Royal College of Art.