Nationality: English Year of Birth: 1919-1999 Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland
Awards
Further Readings About the Author
Personal Information: Family: Born July 15, 1919, in Dublin,
Ireland; daughter of Wills John Hughes (a British civil servant) and
Irene Alice (Richardson) Murdoch; married John Oliver Bayley (a
professor, novelist, critic), 1956. Education: Somerville College,
Oxford, B.A. (first-class honours), 1942; Newnham College,
Cambridge, Sarah Smithson studentship in philosophy, 1947-48.
Religion: Christian. Avocational Interests: Learning languages.
Memberships: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Irish
Academy. Addresses: Home: 30 Charlbury Rd., Oxford OX2
6UU, England.
Career: Writer. British Treasury, London, England, assistant
principal, 1942-44; United National Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), administrative officer in London,
Belgium, and Austria, 1944-46; Oxford University, St. Anne's
College, Oxford, England, fellow and university lecturer in
philosophy, 1948-63, honorary fellow, 1963--; Royal College of
Art, London, lecturer, 1963-67. Member of Formentor Prize
Committee.
Book of the Year award, Yorkshire Post, 1969, for Bruno's
Dream ; Whitehead Literary Award for fiction, 1974, for The
Sacred and Profane Love Machine ; James Tait Black Memorial
Prize, 1974, for The Black Prince; named Commander, Order of
the British Empire, 1976, Dame Commander, 1986; Booker Prize,
1978, for The Sea, the Sea; honorary doctorate, Oxford, 1987;
medal of honor for literature, National Arts Club, 1990; honorary
doctorate, Cambridge, 1993.
NOVELS
Under the Net, Viking, 1954, published with introduction
and notes by Dorothy Jones, Longmans, Green, 1966,
Penguin, 1977.
The Flight from the Enchanter, Viking, 1956.
The Sandcastle, Viking, 1957.
The Bell, Viking, 1958.
A Severed Head, Viking, 1961.
An Unofficial Rose, Viking, 1962.
The Unicorn, Viking, 1963.
The Italian Girl, Viking, 1964.
The Red and the Green, Viking, 1965.
The Time of the Angels, Viking, 1966.
The Nice and the Good, Viking, 1968.
A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Viking, 1970.
An Accidental Man, Viking, 1971.
Bruno's Dream, Viking, 1973.
The Black Prince, Viking, 1973.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Viking, 1974.
A Word Child, Viking, 1975.
Henry and Cato, Viking, 1977.
The Sea, the Sea, Viking, 1978.
Nuns and Soldiers, Viking, 1980.
The Philosopher's Pupil, Viking, 1983.
The Good Apprentice, Chatto & Windus, 1985.
The Book and the Brotherhood, Chatto & Windus, 1987.
The Message to the Planet, Chatto & Windus, 1989.
The Green Knight, Viking, 1994.
Jackson's Dilemma, Viking, 1995.
NONFICTION
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Yale University Press, 1953,
second edition, Barnes & Noble, 1980 (published in England
as Sartre: Romantic Realist, Harvester Press, 1980).
(Contributor) The Nature of Metaphysics, Macmillan,
1957.
(Author of foreword) Wendy Campbell-Purdie and Fenner
Brockaway,Woman against the Desert, Gollancz, 1964.
The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (Leslie
Stephen lecture, 1967), Cambridge University Press, 1967,
published with other essays as The Sovereignty of Good,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, Schocken, 1971.
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists
(based on the Romanes lecture, 1976), Claredon Press,
1977.
Reynolds Stone, Warren, 1981.
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues, Chatto & Windus,
1986, Penguin, 1987.
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: Philosophical
Reflections, Penguin, 1992.
PLAYS
(With J. B. Priestley) A Severed Head (three-act; based on
the author's novel of the same title; first produced in London
at Royale Theatre, October 28, 1964; produced in New
York, 1964), Chatto & Windus, 1964, acting edition,
Samuel French, 1964.
(With James Saunders) The Italian Girl (based on the
author's novel of the same title; first produced at Bristol Old
Vic, December, 1967), Samuel French, 1968.
The Servants and the Snow (first produced in London at
Greenwich Theatre, September 29, 1970), Chatto &
Windus, 1973, Viking, 1974.
The Three Arrows (first produced in Cambridge at Arts
Theatre, October 17, 1972), Chatto & Windus, 1973,
Viking, 1974.
Art and Eros, produced in London, 1980.
The Servants (opera libretto; adapted from the author's
playThe Servants and the Snow ), produced in Cardiff,
Wales, 1980.
The Black Prince (based on the author's novel of the same
title), produced in London at Aldwych Theatre, 1989.
OTHER
A Year of Birds (poems), Compton Press, 1978.
Contributor to periodicals, including the Listener, Yale Review,
Chicago Review, Encounter, New Statesman, Nation, and
Partisan Review.
A Severed Head (based on her novel and play) was filmed by
Columbia Pictures, 1971; the film rights to A Fairly Honourable
Defeat were sold in 1972.
A Production of The Bell has appeared on BBC television
Described by Commonweal's Linda Kuehl as "a philosopher by
trade and temperament," Iris Murdoch is known for her novels full
of characters embroiled in philosophical turmoil. Though originally
aligned with the existentialist movement, Murdoch's philosophy
quickly broadened, and critics now regard her works as "novels of
ideas." In addition, her plays and non-fiction works encompass
similar philosophical debates and add to her reputation as one of her
generation's most prolific and important writers. Murdoch's body of
work has proved influential in twentieth- century literature and
thought; "she draws eclectically on the English tradition" of Charles
Dickens, Jane Austen, and William Thackeray "and at the same time
extends it in important ways," writes John Fletcher inConcise
Dictionary of British Literary Biography.
Though born an only child of Anglo-Irish parents in Ireland,
Murdoch grew up in the suburbs of London and earned a
scholarship to a private school when she was thirteen. At Somerville
College at Oxford, Murdoch was involved in drama and arts when
not immersed in her literature and philosophy studies. Her left-wing
politics led her to join the Communist party for a brief time in the
early-1940s, an affiliation that caused the United States to deny her
a visa to study in the country after winning a scholarship several
years later. Following her distinguished scholastic career, Murdoch
worked at the British Treasury during World War II and later for
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While
working for the United Nations, she traveled to Belgium where she
met Jean-Paul Sartre as well as the French writer Raymond
Quenteau, whose writings greatly influenced her first novel, Under
the Net. During the 1950s, Murdoch taught philosophy at St.
Anne's College at Oxford, and said of the experience to Gill Davie
and Leigh Crutchley in a Publishers Weekly interview: "I love
teaching, and if I were not able to teach philosophy I would happily
teach something else."
The existentialist movement, a philosophy that became popular in
the 1950s in light of the wide-spread despair caused by World War
II, was the impetus for Murdoch's first book. Popularized by such
writers as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism
proposed that because human existence is meaningless, people must
act according to their own free will and may never know the
difference between right and wrong. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
chronicled the thoughts and influences of one of existentialism's most
popular writers. Many critics began to view Murdoch as an
emerging theorist of the philosophy, but as she professed to John
Russell in the New York Times: "I was never a Sartrean, or an
existentialist." Focusing on Sartre's influential Being and
Nothingness, Murdoch examines Sartre's philosophy, and the
events in his personal life that led him to his conclusions. Critics
commended Murdoch's views; Wallace Fowlie in Commonweal
calls it "one of the most objective and useful" interpretations of
Sartre's works, and Stuart Hampshire in New Statesman hails
Murdoch as "one who understands the catastrophes of intellectual
politics, and who can still take them seriously."
Several critics noted similarities between Sartre and Murdoch.
William Van O'Connor writes in The New University Wits, and
the End of Modernism, that like Sartre, Murdoch views man as a
"lonely creature in an absurd world . . . impelled to make moral
decisions, the consequences of which are uncertain." Like Sartre,
says Warner Berthoff in Fictions and Events, Murdoch believes
that writing is "above all else a collaboration of author and reader in
an act of freedom." Bertoff continues: "Following Sartre she has
spoken pointedly of the making of works of art as not only a
`struggle for freedom' but as a `task which does not come to an
end.'"
Though there are similarities, critics note some important differences
between the two philosophers. Gail Kmetz writes in Ms. that
Murdoch "rejected Sartre's emphasis on the isolation and anguish of
the individual in a meaningless world . . . because she felt it resulted
in a sterile and futile solipsism [a belief that the self is the only
existent thing]. She considers the individual always as a part of
society, responsible to others as well as to herself or himself; and
insists that freedom means respecting the independent being of
others, and that subordinating others' freedom to one's own is a
denial of freedom itself. Unlike Sartre, Murdoch sees the claims of
freedom and love as identical." Murdoch states in Chicago Review
that "love is the perception of individuals . . . the extremely difficult
realisation that something other than oneself is real," and that only
when one is capable of love is one free. Murdoch recently toldCA
that she was critical of Sartre's concept of "a leap into pure
freedom" and "his distinction between liberated free persons
(intellectuals, artists, wild and courageous, etc.) and the dull,
machine-like petty bourgeois [not quite unlike Derrida's later
distinction]." But, she adds, "I do not `follow' Sartre or Derrida."
One of Murdoch's major themes in her fiction is how best to respect
the "reality" of others--how best to live "morally." Together with
questions of "love" and "freedom," it comprises her major concern.
"Miss Murdoch's pervasive theme has been the quest for a passion
beyond any center of self," explains New York Times Book Review
critic David Bromwich. "What her characters seek may go by the
name of Love or God or the Good: mere physical love is the
perilous and always tempting idol that can become destroyer." "The
basic idea," says Joyce Carol Oates in the New Republic, "seems
to be that centuries of humanism have nourished an unrealistic
conception of the powers of the will: we have gradually lost the
vision of a reality separate from ourselves. . . . Twentieth-century
obsessions with the authority of the individual, the `existential'
significance of subjectivity, are surely misguided, for the individual
cannot be (as he thinks of himself, proudly) a detached observer,
free to invent or reimagine his life." The consequences of trying to
do so are repeatedly explored in Murdoch's fiction, beginning with
her first published novel, Under the Net.
Based on Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea that we
each build our own "net" or system for structuring our lives--"the
net," Murdoch tells CA, "of language under which we may seek for
what is real"--Under the Net describes the wanderings of Jake
Donaghue as he attempts to structure his. However, "planned ways
of life are . . . traps," observes James Gindin in Postwar British
Fiction, "no matter how carefully or rationally the net is woven, and
Jake discovers that none of these narrow paths really works." Only
after a series of comic misadventures (which change his attitude
rather than his circumstances) is Jake able to accept the
contingencies of life and the reality of other people. He throws off
the net, an act which takes great courage according to Kmetz, "for
nothing is more terrifying than freedom." Under the Net attracted
much critical praise; Davie and Crutchley note that with just one
novel to her credit, Murdoch became one of her generation's
outstanding English writers.
Though situations vary from book to book, the protagonists in
Murdoch's novels generally fashion a "net" of some kind. It may
consist of a set of community mores, or a societal role. For Hilary
Burde, protagonist of A Word Child, the net is a fixed routine. An
unloved, illegitimate child, Hilary becomes a violent juvenile
delinquent. When he is befriended by a teacher, he learns that he
possesses a remarkable skill with words. In the rigid structure of
grammar he seeks shelter from life's randomness. He is awarded a
scholarship to Oxford and begins what should be a successful
career, However, as New York Times critic Bromwich explains,
"The structure of things can bear only so much ordering: his
university job ends disastrously with an adulterous love affair that is
indirectly responsible for two deaths." The story opens twenty years
later, when Gunnar--the husband of Hilary's former lover--appears
in the government office where Hilary holds a menial job. "The
novel's subject," explains Lynne Sharon Schwartz in Nation, "is
what Hilary will do about his humiliation, his tormenting guilt and his
need for forgiveness."
What he does, according to Schwartz, is the worst possible thing.
"He attempts to order his friends and his days into the kind of strict
system he loves in grammar," she says. "This rigid life is not only
penance but protection as well, against chaos, empty time, and the
unpredictable impulses of the self. The novel shows the breakdown
of the system: people turn up on unexpected days, they
refuse--sometimes comically-- to act the roles assigned them, and
Hilary's dangerous impulses do come forth and insist on playing
themselves out." The tragedy of Hilary's early days is repeated. He
falls in love with Gunnar's second wife; they meet in secret and are
discovered. Once more by accident Hilary commits his original
crime.
"At the novel's conclusion," writes Saturday Review's Bruce Allen,
"we must consider which is the illusion: the optimist's belief that we
can atone for our crimes and outlive them or the nihilist's certainty
(Hilary expresses it) that people are doomed, despite their good
intentions, to whirl eternally in a muddle of `penitence, remorse,
resentment, violence, and hate.'" David Bromwich interprets the
moral issue somewhat differently. "Hilary, the artist-figure without an
art," he says, "wants to make the world (word) conform to his every
design, and is being guided to the awareness that its resistance to
him is a lucky thing. . . . Hilary must consent at last to the
arbitrariness of an order imposed on him." Learning to accept the
chaos of life without the aid of patterns or categories is a constant
struggle for Murdoch's characters.
"I believe we live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. And the
great task in life is to find reality," Murdoch told Rachel Billington in
a London Times interview. However, the creation of art, she
toldPublishers Weekly, should be the novelist's goal. "I don't think
a novel should be a committed statement of political and social
criticism," she says. "They should aim at being beautiful. . . . Art
holds a mirror to nature, and I think it's a very difficult thing to do,"
Murdoch continues. The way Murdoch mirrors nature is by creating
what she calls "real characters." According to Berthoff in Fictions
and Events, these are "personages who will be `more than puppets'
and at the same time other than oneself." When asked why these
characters are usually male, Murdoch toldCA: "I find no difficulty in
imagining men. . . . I am very much concerned about the (still
distant) liberation of women. . . . [but] I do not want to write about
`women's problems' in any narrow, specialized sense. I have female
narrators, too. I just identify more with the men."
However, Linda Kuehl explains in Modern Fiction Studies,
Murdoch fails in her attempt to create these "real characters." Her
propensity for nineteenth century characters produces many "types"
that populate her novels, and "in each successive novel there
emerges a pattern of predictable and predetermined types. These
include the enchanter or enchantress--occult, godly, foreign,
ancient--who is torn between exhibitionism and introspection,
egoism and generosity, cruelty and pity; the observer, trapped
between love and fear of the enchanter, who thinks in terms of
ghosts, spells, demons and destiny, and imparts an obfuscated view
of life; and the accomplice, a peculiar mixture of diabolical intention
and bemused charm, who has dealings with the enchanters and
power over the observers," analyzes Kuehl. "Though she produces
many people," Kuehl continues, "each is tightly controlled in a
super-imposed design, each is rigidly cast in a classical Murdochian
role."
Lawrence Graver in the New York Times Book Review expresses
a similar view: "In practice, the more she [talks] about freedom and
opaqueness the more over-determined and transparent her novels
[seem] to become. . . . Despite the inventiveness of the situations
and the brilliance of the design, Miss Murdoch's philosophy has
recently seemed to do little more than make her people
theoretically interesting." Oates mentions this as well in New
Republic, Murdoch's novels are "structures in which ideas, not
things, and certainly not human beings flourish." In The Novel Now,
Anthony Burgess compares Murdoch to a puppeteer who exerts
complete control: "[Murdoch's] characters dress, talk, act like
ourselves, but they are caught up in a purely intellectual pattern, a
sort of contrived sexual dance in which partners are always
changing. They seem to be incapable of free choice."
The Message to the Planet, Murdoch's twenty- fourth novel,
published in 1989, encompasses many of Murdoch's familiar themes
and conflicts. Marcus Vallar is a somewhat sinister mathematics
genius-turned-philosopher; one of "`pure thought' who pushes his
ideas to the point where they might actually kill him through their
sheer intensity," says Anatole Broyard in the New York Times
Book Review. A dying man believes Vallar has cursed him. The
man sends his friend, Alfred Ludens, in search of Vallar, hoping that
Vallar will be able to cure him. Miraculously, Vallar cures the man,
and Ludens is so impressed by the event that he becomes Vallar's
disciple. The book's other plot involves Luden's friend, Franca. In
her quest for perfect love, Franca tolerates her husband's infidelities
while she nurses the dying man. After he recovers, she must deal
with her husband's affairs, and eventually she consents to letting one
of his lovers move in with them.
Though these creatures of an educated middle-class live in a society
that Toronto Globe and Mail reviewer Phyllis Gotlieb calls
"hermetic," they "struggle vividly and convincingly to escape the
chaos beneath their frail lives," Gottlieb continues. "The nature of
discipleship is a subject Murdoch has made her own," claims Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. in aVillage Voice review of The Message to the
Planet, "perhaps because it is the most compelling version of one of
her great subjects--the character who desperately pursues his
fantasy of someone else." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New
York Times adds to a common perception of Murdoch's writing by
stating that "Murdoch's characters are paper thin and as contrived
as origami decorations." Despite this, Lehmann-Haupt continues,
"they burn with such moral passion that we watch them with the
utmost fascination." He also notes that Murdoch's message is
"predictably" that "humans are accidental beings with only love to
make life bearable in a random universe."
With Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch turned to a
nonfiction presentation of her philosophical views. Diogenes Allen
inCommonweal characterizes Murdoch's philosophical position in
the book as consistent with her previous writings, "summarized as
an update of Plato's allegory of the cave" and asserting the
immanence of "the Good." Focusing predominantly on morality,
Murdoch recommends that the Christian conception of God be
replaced with a neo-Platonic conception of the Good. "Now she
applies to her position the expressions `neo-Christianity' and
`modern Christianity,'" comments Allen. Metaphysics as a Guide
to Morals generated mixed responses from philosophers such as
Simon Blackburn, who faults Murdoch's advocation of "salvation
through Platonized religion" in his review in the Times Literary
Supplement. Alasdair MacIntyre in the New York Times Book
Review, however, notes potential critical disagreements with
Murdoch's position but asserts that "it is important not to allow such
disagreements to distract attention from what is to be learned from
this book, both from its central theses and from an impressive range
of topics . . . among them the relationship of artistic to moral
experience, the relevance of deconstructive arguments and the
nature of political morality."
In 1993's The Green Knight, Murdoch tries her hand at retelling
the powerful tale of Sir Gawain and his unkillable foe, the Green
Knight. In the original story, the Green Knight challenges any of
King Arthur's knights to chop off his head; Sir Gawain obliges, but
the beheaded Green Knight does not die. In Murdoch's tale, the
role of Sir Gawain is played by Lucas Graffe, a historian who plots
the murder of his brother, Clement. Before he can bludgeon his
brother, though, a stranger--possibly a mugger--steps in and takes
the blow. Months later the stranger, Peter Mir, returns, seeking
justice from Lucas. "What an outline of the plot . . . fails to convey is
the warmth and humour of this book, and the sheer narrative verve,"
writes A. N. Wilson in Spectator. "It is hard to put down."
"Reading [Murdoch's] work is like watching an expert
needlewoman embroider, with fine silk thread and a dazzling array
of stitches, a large, intricate, multicolored piece of fancywork,"
comments New York Times Book Review contributor Linda
Simon. "But as the design becomes more complicated and the
patterns more repetitious, one senses that the embroiderer may
realize more pleasure than the viewer." Tom Shippey, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement, also found problems withThe Green
Knight --in particular, a lack of plausibility. "It is not a poor grip on
reality which strikes on first on reading this novel," he writes, "rather,
its poor grip on practicality." Still, the New Statesman & Society's
Kathryn Hughes proclaims the novel "a thoroughly good suspense"
story.
Reviewing Murdoch's 1995 novel Jackson's Dilemma in The
Spectator, Caroline Moore argues that Murdoch's detractors are
members of what Murdoch has termed the "journalistic" (or
realistic) school of modern fiction, which rejects elements of the
romance tradition from which much of Murdoch's fiction is derived.
"[Murdoch's] novels often adapt romantic genres--the
love-comedy, the gothic tale," comments Moore. "And they are also
romantic in subject and spirit." The premise of the novel is the
disaster, mystery, and comedy surrounding the sudden
disappearance of Edward Lannion's bride- to-be on the eve of their
wedding day. While Lorna Sage of The Times Literary
Supplement praises the work as "hilarious and horrible--a mystic
farce," Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times expresses
disappointment with the novel's "highly convoluted plot filled with
improbable coincidences and disasters, and a glossy veneer of
mythic allusions and philosophical asides."
Murdoch lived for many years in the English countryside (she now
lives in the city of Oxford) with her husband, John Bayley, a
respected literary critic, and enjoys gardening when she is not
writing. She pays little attention to critical reviews of her work, even
those that are favorable. Murdoch told CA that this is because
"articles I have glanced at seem on the whole unperceptive,
including the friendly ones." Her writing is deliberate and well
thought out; she told CA about the process: "I have always made a
very careful plan of the whole novel before writing the first sentence.
I want to keep the purely inventive stage (plot, characters) open as
long as possible." In addition, all of her writing is done longhand. "I
don't see how anyone can think with a typewriter," she told Davie
and Crutchley. Her most recent novels average more than 500
pages each; a length that Murdoch insists is necessary because it
enables them to encompass "more substance, more thoughts," she
told a LondonTimes interviewer. The London Times also reports
that "her enemies are word processors . . . tight, crystalline, first
person novels, existentialism, and analytical philosophy."
Despite Murdoch's implication that there is room for improvement in
her work, (she confessed to the London Times in a 1988 interview
that she would "like to understand philosophy, [and] I'm just
beginning to now"), many reviewers praise the writing she has done.
"She wears her formidable intelligence with a careless swagger,"
writes Encounter's Jonathan Raban, "and her astonishingly fecund,
playful imagination looks as fresh and effortless as ever. . . . Part of
the joy of reading Iris Murdoch is the implicit assurance that there
will be more to come, that the book in hand is an installment in a
continuing work which grows more and more important as each
new novel is added to it." Adds Broyard: "We have to keep revising
our expectations of what her books are about--usually we find that
we must travel farther and over more difficult terrain than we're
accustomed to."
In 1995 Murdoch announced that she was suffering from severe
writer's block, an admission that was later altered in 1996 when her
husband John Bayley informed The Daily Telegraph of London
that she in fact was a victim of Alzheimer's Disease. Realizing that
her writer's block was attributable to biological forces beyond her
control, Murdoch commented: "I'm afraid I am waiting in vain [to
write]. Perhaps I had better find some other kind of job."
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT MURDOCH
Antonaccio, Maria, and William Schweiker, editors, Iris
Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, University
of Chicago Press, 1996.
Baldanza, Frank, Iris Murdoch, Twayne, 1974.
Berthoff, Warner, Fictions and Events: Essays in
Criticism and Literary History, Dutton, 1971.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and David Palmer, The Contemporary
English Novel, Edward Arnold, 1979, pp. 68-74.
Bradbury, Malcolm, Possibilities: Essays on the State of
the Novel, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 231-46.
Burgess, Anthony, The Novel Now: A Guide to
Contemporary Fiction, Norton, 1967.
Byatt, Antonia S., Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris
Murdoch, Barnes & Noble, 1965.
Conradi, P. J., Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit,
Macmillan, 1985.
Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume
8, Gale, 1992.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973,
Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume
6, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 15,
1980, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 31, 1985, Volume 51,
1989.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British
Novelists Since 1960, Gale, 1982.
Dipple, Elizabeth, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit,
University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Fletcher, John, Iris Murdoch: A Descriptive Primary and
Annotated Secondary Bibliography, Garland, 1983.
Gindin, James, Postwar British Fiction, University of
California Press, 1962.
Gerstenberger, Donna, Iris Murdoch, Bucknell University
Presses, 1975.
Gordon, David J., Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing,
University of Missouri Press, 1995.
Heusel, Barbara Stevens,Patterened Aimlessness: Iris
Murdoch's Novels of the 1970s and 1980s,University of
Georgia Press, 1995.
Kellman, Steven G., The Self-Begetting Novel, Macmillan,
1980, pp. 87-93.
Kermode, Frank, Modern Essays, Fontana, 1971, pp.
261-66.
O'Connor, Patricia J., To Love the Good: The Moral
Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, P. Lang, 1996.
O'Connor, William Van, The New University Wits, and the
End of Modernism, Southern Illinois University Press, 1963,
pp. 54-74.
Rabinowitz, Rubin, Iris Murdoch, Columbia University
Press, 1968.
Spear, Hilda D., Iris Murdoch, St. Marin's Press, 1995.
Stade, George, editor, Six Contemporary British
Novelists, Columbia University Press, 1976, pp. 271-332.
Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, St. James, 1987.
Todd, Richard, Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearean
Interest, Barnes & Noble, 1979.
Todd, Iris Murdoch, Methuen, 1984.
Wolff, Peter, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and
Her Novels, University of Missouri Press, 1966.
PERIODICALS
American Scholar, summer, 1993, p. 466.
Atlantic, March, 1988, p. 100; March, 1990, p. 116;
March, 1994, p. 130.
Chicago Review, autumn, 1959.
Commonweal, November 5, 1953; May 18, 1990, p. 326;
June 14, 1991, p. 399; April 23, 1993, p. 24; April 8, 1994,
p. 21.
Economist, October 24, 1987, p. 107; October 14, 1989,
p. 104; September 25, 1993, p. 99.
Encounter, July, 1974.
Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 28, 1989.
Interview, November, 1992, p. 80.
Listener, April 27, 1978, pp. 533-35.
Modern Fiction Studies, (Iris Murdoch issue) autumn,
1959.
Ms., July, 1976.
Nation, March 29, 1975; October 11, 1975; January 8,
1996, p. 32.
National Review, April 1, 1988, p. 52.
New Leader, April 16, 1990, p. 19.
New Republic, November 18, 1978; June 6, 1988, p. 40;
March 5, 1990, p. 40.
New Statesman, January 2, 1954; January 8, 1988, p. 33.
New Statesman & Society, October 6, 1989, p. 38;
September 17, 1993, pp. 39-40.
New Yorker, May 18, 1987, p. 113.
New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988, p. 36; March
4, 1993, p. 3.
New York Times, January 6, 1981; February 22, 1990;
January 9, 1996, p. 24.
New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1964;
February 8, 1970; August 24, 1975; November 20, 1977;
December 17, 1978; August 10, 1980; January 4, 1981;
March 7, 1982; January 4, 1987, p. 107; January 31, 1988,
p. 1 and 26; February 4, 1990, p. 3; January 3, 1993, p. 9;
January 9, 1994, p. 7; January 7, 1996, p. 6.
Observer, October 25, 1992.
Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1976; November 1,
1993, p. 64; October 23, 1995, p. 57.
Saturday Review, October 5, 1974.
Spectator, September 18, 1993, p. 42; October 7, 1995.
Times (London), April 25, 1983; January 23, 1988.
Times Literary Supplement, October 23, 1992; September
10, 1993, p. 20; September 29, 1995.
Village Voice, July 17, 1990, p. 73.
Yale Review, April, 1992, p. 207.*
Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 1999.
Source Database: Contemporary Authors
PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000071424
Retrieve for viewing and printing from Acrobat™ Reader.
Copyright © 2000, Gale Group. All rights reserved.
Gale Grou