Iris Murdoch

Jean Iris Murdoch was born 15 July 1919 in Phibsborough, Dublin – but moved with her family to London when she was only a few weeks old. She was educated privately, achieving a first-class honours degree studying Literature humaniores at Somerville College, Oxford in 1942. During her time at the college, she had become involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain, but left the party in 1942 and had become disillusioned by 1946. 

Upon her graduation she found work at HM Treasury, before leaving two years later to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) where she operated in Brussels and Austria. After leaving the UNRRA in 1946, Murdoch studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge and took up teaching positions at St Anne’s College, Oxford and the Royal College of Art upon her graduation. 

Although Murdoch had previously published essays on philosophy, her first novel, Under the Net, was published in 1954, and her second, The Flight from the Enchanter in 1956 – both to warm reception for their intelligence, wit and seriousness. These qualities, along with her philosophical analysis of good and evil, morality, the power of the unconscious mind and her skill for navigating the complexities of sophisticated sexual relationships would continue to distinguish her work. Murdoch herself was no stranger to complex relationships, having engaged in multiple affairs with both men and women, despite her happy marriage to literary critic John Bayley in 1956, with whom she remained married until her death. 

With the publication of Murdoch’s fourth book, The Bell (1958), she started to enjoy wide recognition as a novelist, and went on to produce a total of 26 novels over her lifetime as well as poetry and drama. She was awarded several honorary degrees both from universities in Ireland and the UK, and in 1976 she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, which was upgraded to Dame Commander in 1987. Her 1978 novel, The Sea, The Sea, was awarded the Booker Prize – an award which for which she was nominated seven different times. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982 and made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1987. 

The publication of her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was less well received, which some critics attribute to her subsequent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in 1997. Cared for by her husband until her death in Oxford on 8 February 1999, he wrote of his wife’s struggle with the disease in his memoir Elegy for Iris (1999), which was later adapted into film.