Iris Murdoch: A Life

This comprehensive biography gives you the life and thoughts of Iris Murdoch, her development as a writer and as a person. Her sex life is included, but her relationships are merely mentioned. This is a completely G-rated book, no descriptions, no scenes. The purpose is as much to say whom she did NOT sleep with as it is to say whom she did. Iris was quite gregarious and preferred one-on-one conversations. She met with and had drinks with many different people. Most of these she did not sleep with. But she lived completely by her inclinations of the moment, so men knew that it was always possible they might end up in bed but that they probably wouldn't. This made Iris far more popular than if she had slept with everyone she met. Also, Iris never seemed to drop or break up with anyone. She just moved on. She was usually involved with several people at any one time, but didn't talk about it. Like all women, she was susceptible to pretty men, and even though she was no beauty herself, she did get involved with two such men. When they dumped her, she was deeply hurt. Men didn't usually dump her. This led to her holding back in relationships, "never giving all the heart" (as Yeats put it). And this may be one factor that led to her ubiquitous portrayal of distanced relationships in her novels. The other factor is some of the other men she got involved with, especially Canetti. This individual hated women (p. 349). He was "jealous, paranoiac and a mythomaniac" (p. 355). Women, including Iris, adored him to the point of enslavement. He kept many women going at the same time, but hated if any of his women had more than one man. He was also a sadomasochist (p. 357 ff). After having sex, he would contemplate the woman with "a sort of amused hostility" (p. 358). One among the many things he hated was decent people. The characters in his fiction are as sick as he. In 1981 he was given a Nobel Prize for Literature (which tells you something about the Nobel Prize for Literature). His cynical view of people influenced Iris's portrayal of her characters. This biography also covers in detail Iris's intellectual development, and here is where most readers will get lost. The biographer presents detailed issues in philosophy that Iris wrestled with and assumes the reader is familiar with them. For professional philosophers, this material is interesting and it is refreshing not to have to wade through a lot of entry-level explanations of what Sartre thought, what this is, what that means, etc. Most readers, however, will find this material unintelligible. Iris hated analytic philosophy and never seems to have learned much of it. As a result, her own thought bounced around wildly, from Marxism in the `30s, to an interest in existentialism, to Catholicism, to Buddhism, etc. Her philosophical thought and writings are rather muddled, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, among others, were quick to point out when Iris read pap

Writer and philosopher Murdoch played a major role in English writing for nearly half a century: Iris Murdoch: A Life provides her first authorized biography, examining her life and work and revealing not only connections between her life and her art, but the moral and social changes she helped introduce to new generations. The depth of coverage is impressive.

This biography proposes to be about a woman who manufactured 26 novels and who knows what else ( plays etc.).How she did that the author never says . Instead we get knowing little talk about the role of Irish protestants in the 20th century,the life of a lesbian with male friends ,and potted biographies of numerous British personalities and celebrities .We never get a handle on the life of a writer who was a brand name for a while in Britain .We never are told whether Iris Murdoch books sold in the hundreds.