Sibling struggles in Murdoch and Shakespeare

Sibling struggles in Murdoch and Shakespeare

3 November 2024By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

Princes, singing stars and media magnates populate today’s news with their squabbles, but brotherly conflict is a theme as old as Genesis itself: the struggle of Cain and Abel to gain supremacy in the eyes of God the Father, and the murder which follows, sets a dreadful precedent. Sibling rivalry is one of the great forces in the universe, as any honest parent will admit, even if murder does not generally ensue; and it is inevitably an abiding theme in literature. The relationships of siblings are frequently the main focus of the family drama which playwrights and novelists, especially perhaps Shakespeare and Murdoch, explore endlessly and profitably. However, for reasons of length, this blog will devote itself to the central pre-occupation of pairs of brothers.

Re-reading early Murdoch: The Unicorn

Re-reading early Murdoch: The Unicorn

17 April 2024By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

The Unicorn is immediately a kind of frame narrative: a train story itself, which begins with an arrival at a remote railway station and ends with our two narrative guides departing ‘as the express carried them away across the central plain’, leaving behind the dramatic story of Hannah Crean-Smith, the unicorn of the novel’s title.

Re-reading early Murdoch: Flight from the Enchanter

Re-reading early Murdoch: Flight from the Enchanter

10 February 2024By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

As you re-read Flight from the Enchanter, there are moments when you can’t stop yourself from checking its original date of publication. How could this have been written 70 years ago? A press baron trying to take over a small publication, for example? Or the opening paragraph of Chapter 25, which recounts parliamentary questions about migrants and hostile news coverage the following day? Weren’t they just last week?

Re-reading early Murdoch: An Unofficial Rose

Re-reading early Murdoch: An Unofficial Rose

23 November 2023By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

To 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.

The Sandcastle (Re-reading Early Murdoch)

The Sandcastle (Re-reading Early Murdoch)

18 July 2023By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

Murdoch concludes her essay ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959) with a very expressive metaphor: ‘a novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose.’ Surely we see this in The Sandcastle? Moreover, she never again explored the subject of portrait painting or indeed school-teaching in such depth, though we see in her next great novel The Bell a further development of an enclosed society with its tensions between sacred and profane love.