Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Iris Jean Murdoch was a singular figure in twentieth-century literature. In addition to being one of the most distinctive postwar British novelists, producing 26 novels (as well as five plays, a book of poems, a libretto, and a recently rediscovered short story), she was also an esteemed moral philosopher, publishing numerous philosophical books and essays. Murdoch's fiction is an interesting combination of the “classic realist” emphasis on character and detailed description and the conventions of prose romance. Her plots are gripping and full of bizarre twists and coincidences that disrupt the apparent stability of the lives of her characters. Nevertheless her character's experiences, and the way they respond, mean that her novels are serious explorations of profound philosophical questions such as the nature of goodness, love, spirituality, power, and death. Murdoch was born on July 15, 1919 in Dublin, though her family moved to England when she was only a year old. She always regarded herself as an Irish writer, despite spending most of her life in England, and being educated at some of the most quintessentially English institutions (the Froebel Institute, Badminton School, and Cambridge and Oxford universities). Rather than pointing to peculiarly “Irish” qualities in Murdoch's writing, the significance of her insistence is that it indicates her willingness to style herself as ... log in or subscribe to read full text