What makes a novel alcoholic? In light of the above admission about my 2017 thought process, I deduced that I had not made a thorough enough case for choosing A Fairly Honourable Defeat as the tie-in for liver disease and decided to conduct some qualitative research to find out which is Iris Murdoch’s most alcoholic novel.
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.
Whilst each issue celebrates new publications and events, the variety is heightened this year with the focus on Murdoch’s love of conviviality and, especially, beermats. Originally planned for publication as a standalone work on this subject, we are delighted that we were able to include the majority of pieces here. The inclusion of these, and so many other wonderful articles and reviews, makes this 15th edition of the Review the most expansive yet.
The Iris Murdoch Review 16 – to be published in October 2025 – will be a special edition dedicated to the work of North American and North American adjacent scholars.
Barbara Stevens Heusel, who founded the Iris Murdoch Society in Manhattan in 1986, passed away peacefully on Friday, May 10, 2024, at her home in Tallahassee, Florida. She had lived there since retiring in 2005 as Professor of English Emerita at Northwest Missouri State University and is survived by her husband, Dennis Moore.
While it may not be productive to diagnose a writer you have never met or communicated with, it is clear that Murdoch was aware of mental illness and mental difference as a psychological concept. Not only this, but she dealt with it as a subject in her fiction in a highly nuanced way. Perhaps progressively, mental illness and mental difference is not, for Murdoch, something which excludes you from the world of moral philosophy. It, in fact, not only includes, but requires you. The act of recognition of others as being other, and loving them truly for it, is at the centre of Murdoch’s philosophy, and thus her fiction. And is that not the fundamental principle of neurodiversity?
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.
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?
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.
Murdoch’s philosophy of ‘unselfing’ was first coined in The Sovereignty of Good in the 1970s. While the term itself was original, Murdoch’s attempts to grapple with concepts related to the morality of the self followed a trajectory laid down by centuries of her predecessors. One cannot fail to see parallels with the likes of Keats, for example, whose theory of ‘Negative Capability’, an idea that argued for attention to beauty and the freedom of the imagination, was epitomised in his poem Ode to a Nightingale.