I am honoured to have been awarded the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars. I am currently a PhD candidate in the School of Literature at Zhejiang University, China. My doctoral dissertation is titled ‘Reconstructing Subjectivity: A Dialogue between the Ethical and Aesthetic Thought of Iris Murdoch and Wang Yangming’.
The quest of Iris Murdoch to perceive some rays of light piercing through the mist of human confusion and folly will go on for 21 more novels. I’m looking forward to continue my exploration.
Iris Murdoch’s love of Europe began in Belgium in that short but powerfully influential sojourn in the city of Magritte and Hergé, in which, by serendipitous happenstance, she was living when Sartre visited and lectured.
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.