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

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

26 June 2023By Heather RobbinsBlog

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

Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, and English 20th-Century Communitarianism

12 June 2023By Ken WorpoleBlog

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

Para-Illustrating Iris Murdoch

30 May 2023By Matthew RichardsonBlog

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.

Reading Iris. All of it.

Reading Iris. All of it.

8 December 2022By Christopher BoddingtonBlog

I looked out Under the Net from our bookcase and found a lovely old Penguin with Margaret Foreman’s beautiful painting of Jake in his chair. I was captivated again and found we had The Bell, The Nice and the Good and about four or five more. I had to read all of them and then, being something of a completist, had to read the rest of the novels, most of which I had never heard of or seen in print.

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?

Malcolm Bradbury as Murdoch Critic

Malcolm Bradbury as Murdoch Critic

2 August 2021By Robert CreminsBlog

At first glance, Malcolm may seem like a surprising choice as a guide to Murdoch’s novels, because he is best remembered—or so the anecdotal evidence I have gathered suggests—as a Murdoch parodist rather than critic.

Iris Murdoch & Anthony Powell

Iris Murdoch & Anthony Powell

18 June 2021By John PotterBlog

I discovered Iris Murdoch’s novels around the same time that I was becoming immersed in Powell. I had read a few in England, starting with The Bell, before my move to Japan in the mid-1980s. And so, I became a Murdochian as well as a Powellian.

Iris Murdoch’s Legacy

Iris Murdoch’s Legacy

18 September 2020By Miles LeesonBlog

In this article, Miles Leeson follows on from his piece on Murdoch’s centenary last year and discusses the impact the Anglo-Irish writer is having on those who came after her.