The Platonism of the Unicorn

The Platonism of the Unicorn

6 March 2025By Peter Graarup WestergaardBlog

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.

Re-reading early Murdoch: The Unicorn

Re-reading early Murdoch: The Unicorn

17 April 2024By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

The Unicorn is immediately a kind of frame narrative: a train story itself, which begins with an arrival at a remote railway station and ends with our two narrative guides departing ‘as the express carried them away across the central plain’, leaving behind the dramatic story of Hannah Crean-Smith, the unicorn of the novel’s title.