The Black Prince Archives - The Iris Murdoch Society

Sibling struggles in Murdoch and Shakespeare

3 November 2024By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

Princes, singing stars and media magnates populate today’s news with their squabbles, but brotherly conflict is a theme as old as Genesis itself: the struggle of Cain and Abel to gain supremacy in the eyes of God the Father, and the murder which follows, sets a dreadful precedent. Sibling rivalry is one of the great forces in the universe, as any honest parent will admit, even if murder does not generally ensue; and it is inevitably an abiding theme in literature. The relationships of siblings are frequently the main focus of the family drama which playwrights and novelists, especially perhaps Shakespeare and Murdoch, explore endlessly and profitably. However, for reasons of length, this blog will devote itself to the central pre-occupation of pairs of brothers.

Iris Murdoch, Autism, and the Importance of Recognising Otherness

29 April 2024By Danika BrownBlog

While it may not be productive to diagnose a writer you have never met or communicated with, it is clear that Murdoch was aware of mental illness and mental difference as a psychological concept. Not only this, but she dealt with it as a subject in her fiction in a highly nuanced way. Perhaps progressively, mental illness and mental difference is not, for Murdoch, something which excludes you from the world of moral philosophy. It, in fact, not only includes, but requires you. The act of recognition of others as being other, and loving them truly for it, is at the centre of Murdoch’s philosophy, and thus her fiction. And is that not the fundamental principle of neurodiversity?

The Lives and Deaths of Iris Murdoch: A Dialogue

6 October 2023By Frances WhiteBlog

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’.

The Sandcastle (Re-reading Early Murdoch)

18 July 2023By Elizabeth WhittomeBlog

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.

Tom Phillips, Iris Murdoch, and the Flaying of Marsyas

3 March 2023By Rebecca ModenBlog

Murdoch’s great love of the Flaying of Marsyas ignited Phillips’ inspiration. ‘When the National Portrait Gallery commissioned me to paint her portrait I recalled our conversation’, he said, and he ‘started a fairly hasty copy of the picture to act as a backdrop so that she might sit in front of the head of Marsyas.’ Phillips sketched in the Titian with broad brushstrokes; in contrast, he rendered the image of Murdoch herself with great precision and imbued it with a translucent, otherworldly light

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

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.