Dame Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch (Dame Jean Iris Murdoch) , 1919-99, British novelist and philosopher, b. Dublin, Ireland. In 1948 she was named lecturer in philosophy at Oxford, and in 1963 she was made an honorary fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford. Murdoch's novels, subtle, witty, convoluted, puzzling, and often wildly comic, have elicited widely differing critical interpretations. Murdoch views human beings as "accidental" creatures, purportedly free but actually constricted by the boundaries of self, society, and the natural world. Although the plots of her novels are complex, involving innumerable characters in seemingly endless configurations and punctuated by extraordinary incidents, they often focus on one individual's recognition that free will and self-knowledge are illusory.

Among Murdoch's 26 novels are The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), An Accidental Man (1972), The Sea, the Sea (1978; Booker Prize), Message to the Planet (1989), The Green Knight (1994), and Jackson's Dilemma (1995). Murdoch worked on dramatizations of two of her novels, A Severed Head (1963, with J. B. Priestley ), and The Italian Girl (1967, with James Sanders), and she wrote several plays, including Art and Eros (1980). She also published Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good (1971), The Fire and the Sun (1977), and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). In 1956 she married John Oliver Bayley, the novelist and critic who wrote movingly of her in Elegy for Iris (1998). She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.

Bibliography: See biography by P. J. Conradi (2001); studies by A. S. Byatt (1965), P. Wolfe (1966), R. Rabinovitz (1968), D. Gerstenberger (1975), R. Todd (1979, 1988), E. Dipple (1982), A. Hague (1984), P. J. Conradi (1986), C. B. Bove (1986, 1993), D. Johnson (1987), R. C. Kane (1988), D. D. Mettler (1991), P. P. Punja (1993), D. J. Gordon (1995), B. S. Heusel (1995), and H. D. Spear (1995).

Murdoch, Dame Iris (Jean) (1919–99), novelist and philosopher, was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked in the Civil Service, then lectured in philosophy in Oxford and London. In 1956 she married the literary critic J. Bayley. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), a first-person male narration, was followed by many other successful works, including The Bell (1958, set in a lay community in a country house); A Severed Head (1961, dramatized 1963 by J. B. Priestley); The Time of the Angels (1968, set in a murky vicarage in the City, dominated by a satanic priest); The Black Prince (1973, with a 58-year-old male narrator, in love with a 20-year-old, who becomes involved in scenes of domestic violence and tragedy); The Sea, The Sea (1978, a novel about a theatre director and his childhood love, with strong echoes of The Tempest, which won the Booker Prize); The Philosopher's Pupil (1983, her 21st novel); The Good Apprentice (1985); The Book and the Brotherhood (1987); The Message to the Planet (1989); and The Green Knight (1993).

Her novels have been described as psychological detective stories, and her plots have an operatic quality, combining comic, bizarre, and macabre incidents in a highly patterned symbolic structure. Though clearly not intended as strictly realistic, her portrayal of 20th-cent. middle-class and intellectual life shows acute observation, and has baffled critics by its evasion of recognized fictional genres. Her narrative skill conceals the seriousness and abstraction of her preoccupations—with the nature of good and evil, the religious life, the sacred and the taboo, the nature of sexuality and Freudian determinism. She wrote works on philosophy and three plays.