BSH Fund Fellow 2025

BSH Fund Fellow 2025

27 November 2024By Samuel FilbyBlog

I am honored to have been awarded the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars. With this grant, I’ll not only be able to present my work at various universities in the United Kingdom, such as Chichester and Oxford, but will also be able to visit the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. At the archives, I’m hoping to look closely at discussions of imagination and fantasy in Murdoch’s Gifford Lectures, which serve as the basis for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

Losing the Plot: Rereading, Forgetting, and Iris Murdoch

Losing the Plot: Rereading, Forgetting, and Iris Murdoch

21 November 2024By John PotterBlog

It’s a testament to Murdoch’s skill and power as a novelist that it isn’t just about the surprises. She creates delicious suspense and complex plots but is much more than a teller of entertaining stories. While plots are wonderful things, and Murdoch is a great plotter, my not remembering some of them over the decades has only led to a joyful rediscovering each time I open one of her books.

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.

Editorial Preface for the Iris Murdoch Review, issue 15

Editorial Preface for the Iris Murdoch Review, issue 15

23 October 2024By Miles LeesonBlog

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.

Obituary: Barbara Stevens Heusel

Obituary: Barbara Stevens Heusel

4 June 2024By Heather RobbinsBlog

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.

Iris Murdoch, Autism, and the Importance of Recognising Otherness

Iris Murdoch, Autism, and the Importance of Recognising Otherness

29 April 2024By Danika BrownBlog

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?

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?