The Lives and Deaths of Iris Murdoch: A Dialogue
This piece was performed at the University of East Anglia on the 6th December, 2014 as part of an event entitled ‘An Afternoon with Iris: Life, Thought, Writing’.
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The Iris Murdoch Review, No. 14 – Editorial Preface
The influence and impact of Iris Murdoch’s work is increasing exponentially each year and the Iris Murdoch Review likewise seems to grow with each issue. This edition contains a wide-ranging collection of essays, reviews and reports variously connected by specific features. We begin with celebrations of Murdoch at home and abroad, then move on to America, art, philosophy and literature – specifically by women writers: a set of topics that encapsulates Murdoch’s life of working, writing and travelling.
The Lost Jerusalem
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’.
Iris and the Missing Tape
Iris Murdoch herself visited Japan along with husband John Bayley at the request of the British Council. They stayed for around two weeks and the lecture Iris gave in Kobe that I attended took place at the Kobe Institute of St. Catherine’s on Friday 28th May 1993. This wide-ranging talk was on ‘The Modern Novel’.
The Sandcastle (Re-reading Early Murdoch)
Murdoch concludes her essay ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959) with a very expressive metaphor: ‘a novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose.’ Surely we see this in The Sandcastle? Moreover, she never again explored the subject of portrait painting or indeed school-teaching in such depth, though we see in her next great novel The Bell a further development of an enclosed society with its tensions between sacred and profane love.
Iris Murdoch: Oxford Encounters
Encounters with Iris Murdoch in Oxford. What has emerged from most of these memories is how vivid they are and how receptive she was to meeting with ‘ordinary’ people, not necessarily in her academic or literary spheres.
A Letter to the Board of Education – The Timeless Work of Iris Murdoch and Why it Must be Studied by Students in the Years To Come
Iris Murdoch was ahead of her time in many ways, her philosophical work in particular being appreciated decades after her death. Her views on gender fluidity and sexuality were innovative and the way in which she communicates said views is of novel dynamism. Students would be given the opportunity to learn of her personal life as contextual information relating to her work, and in so doing would gain great insight into the intriguing life she led, and also learn from her fascinatingly tangled and occasionally tragic relationships, as well as her internal struggles and complexities.
Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, and English 20th-Century Communitarianism
The ideal of living ‘in community’, of creating an ideal world in miniature, was an underlying leitmotif of late Victorian and 20th century English literary culture, and was of particular interest to Iris Murdoch, author of The Bell. To my mind this is one of her best novels, being the most open to the eddying currents of belief, faith and doubt in the post-war climate of political and social reconstruction. This principally resulted from her ambivalent relationship to the Anglican faith – Peter Conradi at one point describes her as an ‘Anglo-Catholic retreatant’ – and her fascination with the monastic tradition.
Para-Illustrating Iris Murdoch
I am an artist and illustrator undertaking a practice-based PhD project at Kingston School of Art titled Para-Illustration: Gaps, fragments and spaces of the literary imagination. My project explores the space between reading and seeing and the literary and visual to propose the practice of para-illustration – a creative process that uses a writer’s notes, drafts and archives as sources for literary images.
La Grande Murdoch meets Australia’s Trickster-poet
Australia’s ‘trickster-poet’ Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), a brilliant and, in her time, controversial figure, was a great admirer of Iris Murdoch, and in 1967 had a chance briefly to meet her.