Iris Murdoch and J.B. Priestley

Iris Murdoch and J.B. Priestley

15 May 2025By Philip JacksonBlog

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.

The Lost Jerusalem

The Lost Jerusalem

12 September 2023By Miles LeesonBlog

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’.

Collecting Iris Murdoch: The Fiction

Collecting Iris Murdoch: The Fiction

28 November 2022By Miles LeesonBlog

Serious book collecting isn’t the draw it was for earlier generations, and the biggest prices are still attached to the works of the canonical dead white males (although Dickens can be surprisingly cheap), making Murdoch and some of her contemporaries viable and reasonable to collect. So how do you go about starting a collection of Murdoch’s works? Where do you find them? And, crucially, how much should you pay?

Iris Murdoch’s Beermats: A Unique Literary Collection

Iris Murdoch’s Beermats: A Unique Literary Collection

6 July 2022By Anne RoweBlog

Murdoch’s beer mats point the way to how some of the most dramatic moments of her life were played out in pubs, as indeed they are for many characters in her novels. The names of scores of pubs lie within their pages, for it is to pubs that characters go to weep, to quarrel, to think, to hope, and often to come to conclusions that will destroy their lives.