Re-Reading Iris Murdoch’ s Early Fiction
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.
A Severed Head
Iris Murdoch and J.B. Priestley
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.
‘It depends on the liver’: Alcoholism, Detoxification, Regeneration and Wound-healing in A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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.
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’.
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.
Collecting Iris Murdoch: The Fiction
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
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.
BSH Fund Fellow – Arka Basu
In this blogpost Arka Basu, the first recipient of the Barbara Stevens Heusel Early-Career Fund, discusses his doctoral work and future research in the UK