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The Iris Murdoch Review
Edition 14, 2023
This issue of the Iris Murdoch Review contains a wide-ranging collection of essays, reviews and reports variously connected by specific features. We begin with celebrations of Murdoch at home and abroad, then move on to America, art, philosophy and literature – specifically by women writers: a set of topics that encapsulates Murdoch’s life of working, writing and travelling.
Latest from the blog

A Clockwork Iris
1 December 2023Murdoch’s notable 1961 essay ‘Against Dryness’ introduces the idea of the ‘written’ novel – a line of argument that is an instance of the ‘confident, ambitious breadth of reference’ Peter J. Conradi mentions in his preface to Existentialists and Mystics:
Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.
Welcome to the Iris Murdoch Society Website. The society exists to champion the work, and celebrate the life, of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch: one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Twentieth Century.
Murdoch's work spans fiction (26 novels), philosophy, plays, poetry and thousands of letters. All of her work is still in print, and you can find recent books about her life and work in our online shop.
The Society is for all readers and enthusiasts with hundreds of members from accross the world. We organise regular events in the UK, and promote events worldwide. We organise a bienniel international conference alongside a bienniel Summer School.
Become a member
Join the Iris Murdoch Society to:
- Receive the Iris Murdoch Review on publication
- Keep up to date with scholarship, new publications, symposia and other information
- Be entitled to reduced rates for the biennial Iris Murdoch Conferences at Chichester University
Podcast
Events
Iris Murdoch Society Christmas Lecture
Thursday 21 December @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm at Zoom
Blog

A Clockwork Iris
1 December 2023Murdoch’s notable 1961 essay ‘Against Dryness’ introduces the idea of the ‘written’ novel – a line of argument that is an instance of the ‘confident, ambitious breadth of reference’ Peter J. Conradi mentions in his preface to Existentialists and Mystics:
Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.

Re-reading early Murdoch: An Unofficial Rose
23 November 2023To re-read is not only to be swept up in thematic concerns. Once again, we are captivated by Murdoch’s genius as a novelist. If we have become used, some 60+ years later, to a restricted range of fashionable cultural concerns viewed through the narcissistic prism of semi-memoir, then re-absorption into Murdoch’s writing can be rich stuff indeed.

BSH Fund Fellow 2024
13 November 2023I am very honoured to have been awarded the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars. I currently work as an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Languages, Tongji University, China. I obtained my doctorate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and I spent 2017-18 at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre under the supervision of Dr Miles Leeson. The title of my PhD dissertation is ‘Transcendence and Disunity: A Study of Iris Murdoch’s Void’.
