The Twelfth International Conference on Iris Murdoch studies will take place at the University of Chichester in 2026. The conference will showcase ongoing, and published, Murdoch scholarship with a particular focus on ‘Influences and Inspirations’.
It is not difficult to imagine Iris Murdoch’s enraged grief over current events in Gaza and Israel.
You’ll probably have recognised Murdoch’s 1975 first person narrative A Word Child here. But did you notice the Hassan reference, caught up as you were in the drama between Hilary Burde and Lady Kitty at the end of that novel?
A Severed Head is perhaps Murdoch’s most successful foray into the world of theatre. She co-wrote the script for A Severed Head with the playwright and novelist JB Priestley. While Murdoch’s career as a playwright was limited, she did at least have this one triumph in the West End and established a lasting friendship with Priestley.
Iris Murdoch, the great Anglo-Irish Platonist philosopher and novelist of the twentieth century reassesses Irish themes and settings from a Platonic perspective in her novel The Unicorn (1963). The novel unfolds a complex and ambiguous relationship between Platonism and Ireland as a setting.
Iris and John were so different yet complementary. He was all sparkle, lightness and conviviality; she had a stillness and austere seriousness at her centre. Almost like a Cavalier versus a Puritan, the sun versus the moon.
Today Iris, John and my parents drove to Portland Bill for a picnic. John and Mamma looking fantastic in the Moke* and the rest of us in the 1100 MG which we’ve had for a year now. We stopped at Wadden a most beautiful Georgian house which they admired tremendously.
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.
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.
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.