The Eleventh International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2024. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on Aspirations and Inspirations.
Few authors write and subsequently publish their first attempted work, and Iris was no exception. Several novels were started and later discarded (almost certainly destroyed) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We know very little about any of these save ‘Our Lady of the Bosky Gates’.
Serious book collecting isn’t the draw it was for earlier generations, and the biggest prices are still attached to the works of the canonical dead white males (although Dickens can be surprisingly cheap), making Murdoch and some of her contemporaries viable and reasonable to collect. So how do you go about starting a collection of Murdoch’s works? Where do you find them? And, crucially, how much should you pay?
The 2022 Iris Murdoch Review places Murdoch in dialogue with contemporary novelists and philosophers whose views put her beliefs into sharp relief and develop conversations that have been ongoing since Murdoch’s centenary in 2019.
The first Sino-British Iris Murdoch Conference is scheduled for Sunday 8th August, 2021. This is the result of a growing relationship between the Research Centre at Chichester, and the growing number of academics in China.
We are delighted to announce the full line-up for our Virtual Conference next month, 15th July 2021. All the papers, bar the plenaries, will be available to watch in advance via this link.
The Research Centre at Chichester was delighted to announce the start of a new working relationship with Palgrave Macmillan; an open-ended project entitled ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ that will produce two books a year (monographs and edited collections) overseen by myself and the Deputy Director of the Centre, Frances White.
Welcome to the new Iris Murdoch Society website! We hope you’ll enjoy the content on offer, along with the podcasts and free downloadable copies of the Iris Murdoch Reviews: and don’t forget to visit the shop!
In this article, Miles Leeson follows on from his piece on Murdoch’s centenary last year and discusses the impact the Anglo-Irish writer is having on those who came after her.
In this essay Miles Leeson suggests that the under-discussed friendship between Elizabeth Bowen and Iris Murdoch is one that warrants further attention.