Iris Murdoch - a Life

by PConradi (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.40

  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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.40

  Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A.S. Byatt notes, she is absolutely central to our culture . As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognizable Murdoch world, and the adjective Murdochian has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interract intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well-known; hers has been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. For Iris's formative years, documented by Conradi's meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured the Second World War.