iris murdoch biography

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Iris Murdoch

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• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Iris Murdoch
• Famous Philosophers - Iris Murdoch
• Dictionary of Irish Biography - (Jean) Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch (born July 15, 1919, Dublin , Ireland—died February 8, 1999, Oxford , Oxfordshire , England) was a British novelist and philosopher noted for her psychological novels that contain philosophical and comic elements.

After an early childhood spent in London, Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration . In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Murdoch’s first published work was a critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). This was followed by two novels, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that were admired for their intelligence, wit, and high seriousness. These qualities, along with a rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing the tensions and complexities in sophisticated sexual relationships, continued to distinguish her work. With what is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958), Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel , Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well received; some critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease with which she had been diagnosed in 1994. Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his memoir , Elegy for Iris (1999; adapted as the film Iris [2001]). A selection of her voluminous correspondence was published as Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 (2016).

Murdoch’s novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals are interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre , the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behaviour, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism .

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Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was a prominent British philosopher of the second half of the 20 th century, best known for her moral philosophy. Unusual for her times, she combined her grounding in Wittgensteinian and linguistic/analytic philosophy with a strong influence of 19th and 20 th century Continental philosophy, Christian religion and thought, and Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. Though linked with virtue ethics, care ethics, and particularism, she developed a unique form of Platonic moral realism not readily assimilated or even comparable to any of the dominant approaches to ethics in 20 th century Anglo-American philosophy.

1. Overview

2. murdoch’s trajectory and reception, 3. murdoch in her times, 4. murdoch’s view of the self against the existentialist/behaviorist account, 5.1 moral reality as other persons, 5.2 moral reality as platonic good, 5.3 murdoch, sidgwick, plato and the self/other moral framework, 5.4 moral realism, fact and value, practical reason, 5.5 moral reality as metaphysics, 5.6 metaphor, 6. moral agency as inner activity, 7. the fabric of moral being, 8. seeing replaces doing, 9. simone weil, 10.1 care ethics, feminism, and particularity, 10.2 particularity and particularism, 10.3 obstacles to loving attention, 11. murdoch’s focus on the active dimension of moral formation, 12. the absence of social sources of negative moral formation in murdoch’s philosophy, 13. moral seeing as a spiritual achievement vs. the unreflective good, non-egoistic person, 15.2 axioms, a. primary literature: books and papers by iris murdoch, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Murdoch’s family was middle class (her father was a civil servant) and Irish Protestant (an identity that remained important to Murdoch throughout her life). They moved to London from Ireland when Murdoch was very young. Murdoch attended Oxford University, overlapping with three other women—Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—at a time (1938–1942) when many male students were away at war. Foot, Murdoch, and Midgley all became prominent and influential moral philosophers, and Anscombe a prominent philosopher of action and a student, friend, translator and interpreter of Wittgenstein.

The four (now being referred to as the “Wartime Quartet” [MacCumhaill & Wiseman 2022; Lipscomb 2021]) stayed in touch after the war, and Murdoch did so with each of them individually. All four pushed back against various aspects of the male-dominated Oxford orthodoxy of linguistic and analytic philosophy (e.g., the fact/value dichotomy, the severing of ethics from an understanding of human nature, the neglect of virtue and vice), though their own philosophies differed significantly from one another.

Over her lifetime Murdoch developed an entirely distinctive position in moral philosophy, as well as philosophy of art and religion (both of which she saw as important for morality). She was engaged with the Anglo-American moral philosophy of that period and its historical antecedents (such as Hobbes and Hume) but was equally engaged throughout her life with traditional and some then-current “Continental” philosophy—especially Schopenhauer, Hegel, Heidegger (on whom she wrote a book, to be published in the near future), Sartre, Adorno, Buber, and Derrida; with Christian thinkers St. Paul, St. Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart, Julian of Norwich; and with Hindu and especially Buddhist thought. Her views were also strongly influenced by Plato, Kant, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein, and she declared herself in 1968 to be “a kind of Platonist” (Rose 1968).

Murdoch taught at Oxford from 1948–1963 (as both tutor and lecturer), and was highly regarded by colleagues, often appearing in collections and BBC programs with leading British philosophers generally though not always in the analytic or linguistic tradition. She was comfortable with the analytic approach, though her thinking was clearly headed in different directions, in part because of the influence of Simone Weil (Broackes 2012a: 19–20).

However, unusual for Oxford philosophers of that period, she was also drawn to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, to which she had been exposed while working after the war in Belgium (and Austria) for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Her first book, in 1953, was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist . She was instrumental in bringing French thinkers of that period, including also Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist/existentialist, and Albert Camus, to an English-speaking audience.

Murdoch left her position at Oxford in 1963 (though she continued to live in Oxford for some of each week) and increasingly lost touch with British academic philosophy. As of this writing, Murdoch is best known for a collection of three essays written in the 1960s, none originally published in easily accessible philosophy venues, published in 1970 as The Sovereignty of Good . This collection is by far the main source for professional philosophers writing on Murdoch, and of Murdoch’s broader impact on moral philosophy, and this entry will draw largely but not exclusively on that work.

Toward the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, some Anglo-American philosophers began to make use of Murdoch in criticizing moral philosophy of the day, or in developing a distinctive position of their own. This included Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Cora Diamond, Genevieve Lloyd, John McDowell, Raimond Gaita, Martha Nussbaum, Lawrence Blum and Sabina Lovibond. This early secondary literature did not involve deep scholarly engagement with Murdoch’s own work, but was inspired by it and helped bring Murdoch to the attention of the wider professional philosophical world.

A collection of almost all Murdoch’s previous articles (including those in Sovereignty ) plus a short book on Plato was published in 1997, as Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by her friend and biographer, the literary scholar Peter Conradi. That and the first scholarly collection on her work, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Antonaccio & Schweiker 1996), with essays by theologians and philosophers (including Diamond, Nussbaum, and Taylor) prompted an increase in scholarship directly on Murdoch in the 2000s. Justin Broackes’s Iris Murdoch, Philosopher , in 2012, was the first all-philosopher collection on Murdoch. While the recent scholarship sometimes aims at demonstrating Murdoch’s relevance to current live issues in Anglo-American ethics (Setiya 2013; Hopwood 2018), increasingly, scholarship (including the two articles just cited) engages with Murdoch’s own philosophical preoccupations on her terms.

In 1992, Murdoch published her sole book working out her own philosophical views ( Sovereignty being a collection of separately published essays), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals . Murdoch’s views, especially in the latter work, have been difficult for contemporary philosophers to place comfortably within the intellectual terrain of moral philosophy as it has developed in our time, in part because of her unusual range of intellectual touchstones; in part because, especially in Metaphysics , she seldom writes in a standard “argument/conclusion” format; and in part because of her intellectual distance from contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. There is currently very little secondary literature on Metaphysics , but Dooley and Hämäläinen’s 2019 collection, Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals will hopefully spur further scholarship on that work. A Routledge Handbook, Hopwood and Panizza’s The Murdochian Mind (forthcoming), will contribute substantially to Murdoch scholarship.

Murdoch is distinctive as a philosopher in another way as well. Beginning in 1954, she became a published novelist, with twenty-six novels in her lifetime, several of which won or were short-listed for important British literary prizes. Although her philosophy and her novels can be read entirely separately from one another, they are plausibly regarded as connected and mutually illuminating, although in interviews Murdoch sometimes denied this. A good deal of scholarly literature (mostly from literary scholars [but from the philosophy side, see Nussbaum 1990; Browning 2018b]) is devoted to exploring their connection and non-connection. Murdoch is the subject of an award-winning biography, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch , by Peter Conradi (2001), and an award-winning film of that same year, Iris (dir: Richard Eyre), based on a memoir by Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, which focuses largely on her decline into Alzheimer’s in her last years (Bayley 1999). The Iris Murdoch Society publishes (since 2008) a twice-yearly journal, the Iris Murdoch Review (see Other Internet Resources ), that had been almost entirely a venue for scholarship and commentary on Murdoch’s literary oeuvre, but recently has started to carry much more philosophy.

As is generally recognized, the English philosophical tradition has a strong empiricist and anti-metaphysical bent. An important exception was the late 19 th and early 20 th century movement of a Hegelian-influenced “absolute idealism”, whose most prominent exponent was F.H. Bradley (1846–1924). This movement was seen as discredited by two prominent early 20 th century British philosophers, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. The final blow was dealt by A.J. Ayer “logical positivist” work, Language, Truth, and Logic , channeling for an English audience views developed by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s. Logical positivism essentially declared that what made a statement meaningful was the possibility of verifying it through empirical observation. Science was seen as the paradigm, though not the only, form of meaningful discourse. Metaphysical statements typical of British Idealism, such as that “all reality is one” or that “time is unreal”, were viewed as meaningless because unverifiable. Ethical and evaluative statements, such as that killing is wrong, were taken to have no cognitive significance. Murdoch thus came of age when the metaphysical tradition was still within memory (she read Bradley seriously and taught him), even if regarded as discredited. For her entire career, she retained a strong sense of the value of metaphysics both in itself and as providing broader visions and structures for moral philosophical reflection, while also appreciating the force of especially a Wittgensteinian critique of traditional metaphysics. Her main tutor at Oxford, Donald MacKinnon, with whom she remained close through much of her younger life, was a philosophical theologian, and helped influence her in a less positivistic direction, also less distant from and hostile to religion (MacKinnon 1957).

Soon verificationism and its related ethical view, “emotivism” (ethical statements express emotions, especially of approval and disapproval) was abandoned and a more sophisticated, and (in Oxford) a much more influential view of ethical language was developed by R.M. Hare, in his 1952 The Language of Morals . Hare said that moral statements did not aim to make truthful assertions, but had a distinct character as prescriptions, telling their addressees to do what is stated in the prescription. Hare’s view, “universal prescriptivism”, said that a prescription no matter what its content was moral if the subject prescribed it for all (or everyone relevantly similarly situated), and in that sense universally.

Hare’s account of ethics involved several assumptions, not always articulated, but widely shared in the practice of moral philosophy in the 1950s (and many of them beyond). Murdoch’s rejection of all of them provides an essential backdrop to her distinctive approach to ethics.

• Fact/value dichotomy: A fact can never entail a value. If a term appears to be simultaneously factual and evaluative (e.g., “rude”, to take an example made famous by Murdoch’s dear friend Philippa Foot), it is really a conjunction of a descriptive/factual meaning and an evaluation conferred on the factual referent by the speaker. This view is inherited from the empiricist tradition “created in the scientific image” (SG 1970: 28/321 [ 1 ] ). Murdoch says it is “the most important argument in modern moral philosophy” (M&E 1957/EM: 64).
• Moral agents all inhabit the same shared world of facts (M&E 1957/EM: 71).
• Values are not part of the world, capable of being discovered by individual agents, but are brought to or projected onto the world by moral agents. Quite often, situations present no moral issues for the agent at all.
• The fundamental subject matter of ethics is what acts persons should perform, and principles and procedures for determining those acts, not what kind of person it is good to be (e.g., what sort of qualities of character, or virtues, it is good to have), or how to describe the human world, an enterprise Murdoch takes to be inherently ethical.
• “The individual’s ‘stream of consciousness’ is of comparatively little importance, partly because it is often not there at all, and more pertinently because it is and can only be through overt acts that we can characterize another person mentally or morally” (VCM 1956/EM 77). Inner reflection is of moral interest only as it issues in choice, decision and action.
• Metaphysics has no legitimate role to play in ethics, and is not an intellectually coherent project.
• The role of the moral philosopher is distinct from that of the moralist, who aims to “elaborate a moral code or encourage its observance”, as Ayer says (Warnock 1960: 131). The task of the moral philosopher is to analyze the character of moral statements, a linguistic/analytic rather than moral enterprise. The moral philosopher qua philosopher should remain neutral on specific moral issues or more generally on questions about how to act and live.

Murdoch’s rejection of all these views in her writings of the 1950s and 60s is partly connected with her take on existentialism. Existentialism attracted Murdoch partly because it was a philosophy one could “inhabit” or “live by” [OGG: 47/337]. For existentialism it mattered tremendously what one did, in particular situations as well as with one’s life overall, and how philosophy was to guide and illuminate that journey. That sense of urgency is lacking in British philosophical ethics in its turn toward characterizing “the language of morals”, partly because this enterprise was seen as morally neutral, not having implications for conduct. (Murdoch’s friend Foot, who herself famously challenged the idea that the language of morals was morally neutral, poignantly captured Murdoch’s relation to the linguistic turn in ethics: “We were interested in moral language, she was interested in the moral life…She left us, in the end” [Conradi 2001: 302].)

Murdoch developed her own view of morality in reaction against both Hare and (notwithstanding her admiration for it) Sartrean existentialism as she understood it. (For a critique of her take on existentialism, see Moran 2012.) Both viewed freedom as fundamental to the moral enterprise. For Hare the moral agent is free to choose their moral values, constrained only by the requirement that the agent prescribe those values universally. Sartre shares the former view but eschews the universalist “logic of morality” constraint. [ 2 ] For Sartre, anguish (Angst) attends our recognition that our choices are totally up to us; Hare’s view lacks that existential anguish. But what interests Murdoch is their shared privileging of the choosing will in the moral enterprise, the central image of the moral agent as responsible and free (and, in Hare’s case, rational), and their rejection of a structure of objective value outside the individual that gives authoritative direction for deciding and choosing. Murdoch sees the appeal of this view, in both its existentialist and analytic forms, but finds it false to our moral experience and to the nature of moral agency.

In the 1962 “The Idea of Perfection” (in Sovereignty ), Murdoch begins to develop a contrasting picture of the self, moral agency, and moral reality, building on her 1956 “Vision and Choice in Morality”. Her stated target is not Hare, who is only briefly mentioned, but Stuart Hampshire, whom she admired as a subtler and deeper thinker (and to whom she dedicated Sovereignty ) and whom she regarded, in his 1959 Thought and Action , as having articulated and defended much more explicitly than Hare the view of human agency and the self underlying Hare’s moral theory (largely but not entirely incorporating the seven characteristics of Hare’s philosophy mentioned above). Murdoch says that the will does not engage in choice out of nowhere, but out of a rich and complex individual psyche formed by ongoing attitudes, perceptions, drives, attachments, beliefs, and modes of attention. This substantial self is in the process of formation, change, and development all the time; and it provides the context for choice in determinate situations (against point 4 above ). Murdoch notes that sometimes our way of apprehending a particular situation will seem to make so evident to us what we should do that processes of deliberation standardly underlying choice will not be necessary and we will simply perform the action. We should not, she thinks, value a kind of “freedom” that would exert will contrary to an accurate perception of moral features of the situation that bear on conduct.

Murdoch says that philosophy should develop a moral or philosophical psychology that provides the terms in which to understand and characterize the substantial self to which she gives center stage, displacing the existentialist/analytic (which she sometimes calls “existentialist-behavioristic”) freely choosing will. This call for a new turn in philosophical ethics toward what came to be called “moral psychology” helped to usher in that subject. It somewhat echoed Murdoch’s friend Elizabeth Anscombe’s similar but more radical and striking charge in her 1958 “Modern Moral Philosophy” to put the subject of ethics on hold until a philosophical psychology that clarified the notions of intention, will, desire, and belief could be developed. But Anscombe thought of philosophical psychology as an enterprise independent of and prior to doing ethics (Anscombe 1958 [1997: 38]). By contrast Murdoch did not think such a philosophical psychology (a term she also sometimes used but more frequently used “moral psychology”) could be separated from ethics (OGG: 46/337; Diamond 2010; Brewer 2009: 8–9).

Murdoch takes some steps toward developing such a moral psychology by embracing Freud as the great theorist of the human mind, who

sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. (OGG: 51/341)

This substantial self constrains the will much more extensively than the existentialist/analytic picture recognizes. “The area of [the moral agent’s] vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great” (SGC: 78/364). We cannot easily rid ourselves of pernicious emotions, attachments and motives that work against moral motivation and behavior. Murdoch adds,

Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings. (OGG: 51/241)

She sees the Freudian view as “a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man” (OGG: 51/241), one of many places where her philosophy is influenced by a Christian worldview, as she fully recognizes. This pessimistic view of the human psyche plays a central role in Murdoch’s thought for her entire life, bolstered by her encounter with Schopenhauer and her particular take on Kant, both of whom articulate a philosophic dualism with a strong egoistic anti-moral force countered by a moral force (differing among those two philosophers) in the psyche.

5. Moral Reality and Moral Realism

Murdoch’s critique of the existentialist/analytic conception of the self and the will mirrors her critique of both the Sartrean and Harean rejection of a moral reality outside the individual self. She believes in that reality, that it can be known by human persons, and that that reality, or the apprehension of it, motivates us to act morally. She is thus a “moral realist”, “moral objectivist” and “moral cognitivist” (thus rejecting point 3 [values are not part of the world]).

There are three distinct strands within Murdoch’s conception of moral reality—“other persons”, “the Good”, and “metaphysics”. Murdoch does not pull the three together into an overall systematic view of moral reality.

A central strand in Murdoch’s view is that moral reality is other persons. Murdoch is not thinking of “other persons” as an aggregate, nor primarily as instances of a category. Rather a given moral agent’s moral reality consists in the individual reality of each other person, one at a time.

In this strand, Murdoch emphasizes the complexity and difficulty of apprehending the moral reality in question. She says that we are prone to fantasy and egoism (the “fat, relentless ego” [OGG: 52/342]) that block us from being able to see other persons clearly; from appreciating that they are as real as oneself (SBL 1959/EM: 215); from a lived recognition of their separateness and differentness (OGG: 66/353); and from grasping their true individual character (OGG: 59/348). Our ego must in a way be silenced—a process she refers to as “unselfing” (a concept she draws from Simone Weil’s “décreation”)—in order for us to fully grasp reality in this sense. [ 3 ] (“We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else”. OGG: 59/349) Murdoch’s novels frequently portray characters lost in their own world who see others primarily through their own fantasies of them. But Murdoch also emphasizes a more general contingency and idiosyncrasy of persons, resulting in a general opaqueness of persons to each other, a point apparently independent of the one about fantasy and egoism, though complementing it.

Murdoch thinks grasping the reality of the other comes in degrees, that extend to a “perfect” understanding of another, a state that can be aimed at but not actually attained. She often speaks of levels of understanding—of persons, concepts, ideas—an idea she increasingly comes to associate with Plato, and that she connects with a “perfectionism” that holds out the perfect understanding as a (moral) standard (IP: 29/322; OGG: 61/350). The moral challenge of knowing the other differs for each individual agent because each agent encounters different people, but also because the task and challenge of knowing differs for each agent in relation to each other person.

Sometimes Murdoch expresses the “other persons” strand in more general terms—not only individual persons but “individual realities” outside the (agent’s) self. This can include natural objects such as a tree or an individual animal, but also non-animate and conceptual objects such as a language or a subject matter, and also situations. She sometimes, and increasingly so in Metaphysics , sees an appreciation of all of reality in its manifold detail as a crucial form of moral aspiration, and there is evidence in her novels of a special appreciation of natural objects, not only living beings, and not only as beautiful (White 2020). But more frequently Murdoch regards other persons specifically as the content of moral reality.

A second, and increasingly prominent, strand in Murdoch’s view of moral reality is that it is “The Good”, understood in a Platonic sense. One element in Murdoch’s Platonism is that something like the form of the Good constitutes what is known when we have moral knowledge, and is also what is sought and loved. We achieve that understanding through knowing and loving the good in good particular things (including persons but also art, nature and ideas), then ascending to an understanding of Good itself. (Murdoch frequently employs Plato’s “ascending” metaphor [e.g., SGC: 94/377].) Murdoch also says, attributing it to Plato, that the Good is like a light that enables us to see goodness in particular things (SGC: 93/376).

Murdoch explicitly rejects two philosophically familiar ways to understand “good”—a functional use (“good knife”; SGC: 93/376) and good as “the most general adjective of commendation” (SGC: 98/381). These do not give us a clue to the concept. “A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the idea of goodness and the Good” (SGC: 99/381).

While the Good is an object of both knowledge and love for Murdoch (and she links those two notions (“to love, that is, to see” [OGG: 66/354]; “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love” [OGG: 67/354]), she does not subscribe to the aspect of Plato’s view that regards the forms as more real than individual objects and persons who partake of them in the world of experience, nor as inhabiting a transcendent world beyond our world of experience (Hämäläinen 2019: 267). And she rejects this as a proper interpretation of Plato (SGC: 96/378f; Robjant provides a detailed defense of her interpretation of Plato [Robjant 2012].)).

The Good and other persons are distinct strands in Murdoch’s view of moral reality. But they reinforce each other. Hopwood interprets Murdoch as saying that “we love particular individuals in light of the Good, and we love the Good through particular individuals” (Hopwood 2018: 486). Murdoch’s view is not analogous to Kant’s idea that respecting the other person involves directing that respect to the moral law or rational will within them, or to their best self. (Velleman defends a form of Kant’s view as Murdochian, understanding rational will to be the capacity for valuing [Velleman 1999 (2006: 100)]. Hopwood criticizes this view [Hopwood 2018: 482].) For Murdoch loving and knowing other persons is also not the same as knowing what is distinctly good in them or about them. Susan Wolf rejects the idea that loving attention as Murdoch (and she) understand it affirms the moral goodness, or overall goodness, of its object. One can love, and direct loving attention to, another whose deficiencies and faults she fully recognizes (Wolf 2014). Both Cordner and Wolf emphasize that it is the person as a whole that is the proper object of loving attention (Cordner 2016; Wolf 2014). Murdoch agrees, in giving a criticism of Kant: “Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled-up historical individuals” (M&E 1957/EM: 215).

Other connections between the Platonic and the other persons strands, not necessarily incompatible with the ones mentioned, have been proposed. Clarke suggests that the Good is a perfectionist principle in Murdoch, so that seeing other persons in light of the Good is just an expression of her perfectionism, pushing the agent to achieve a more and more just, loving, and complete perception of that person (Clarke 2012). Dorothy Emmet, an older contemporary and friend of Murdoch presses a similar view, that the Good should be thought of as a “regulative ideal” in the Kantian sense, “an indefinable standard towards which we can turn in appreciation of” what is Good (or Beautiful). But Emmet differs from Clarke in denying that this is a moral principle (Emmet 1994 [this book was dedicated to Murdoch]: 65–66; see also 1979 for one of the first scholarly engagements with Murdoch). Emmet likely also influenced Murdoch’s resistance to British philosophy’s jettisoning of metaphysics in its analytic and linguistic modalities in the 1950s, through Emmet’s defense of metaphysics in her 1945 The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking ; which Murdoch read, and in her and Murdoch’s attempts starting in the 1950s (and in all of Murdoch’s subsequent writings) to bring religion and philosophy closer together. Murdoch acknowledges that the Christian conception of God influences her understanding of the Good. “I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention” and that we should retain a non-theistic concept [i.e., Good] with those characteristics (OGG: 55/344). This semi-religious dimension relates to the idea Murdoch occasionally expresses, and more so in Metaphysics , that the Good is a source of energy that is not found within our “natural psychology” (OGG: 71/358).

Though “the Good” is a distinctly Platonic strand in Murdoch’s view of moral reality, the “other persons” strand is un-Platonic in two important ways. One is that it involves a sharp separation between self and other, and identifies morality with attention to, love of, or concern for the other and not the self. Henry Sidgwick articulated a standard view in Anglo-American moral philosophy on this matter when he said that the field of ethics made an important step beyond the ancients when it articulated self-interest as a distinct rational principle of action that is separate from a principle of the good of others, understood impersonally. (He attributed this discovery to Bishop Butler.) (Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 404]; Sidgwick 1886 [1902: 197–8]; Brewer 2009: 193). Neither Plato nor Aristotle have this exclusively other-focused conception of virtue, common to both Murdoch and the tradition Sidgwick identifies and praises. Murdoch agrees with Sidgwick’s self/other distinction as one of great moral significance, though she does not regard cognizing or caring for the other in terms either of rationality or principle.

A second difference from Plato (and Aristotle) is Murdoch’s rejection of the Greeks’ sense that virtue and virtuous action are good for their agent as well as for their own sake (but the former “good for” is not understood by Plato or Aristotle prudentially and is not separable from virtue being good for its own sake [Brewer 2009: 202]). For Murdoch it is indeed good to act virtuously, and doing so helps to constitute the agent as morally good. But she does not understand this virtuousness as intrinsically good for the agent. Virtue is pointless, as Murdoch often says (OGG: 71/358; SGC: 78/364), and this is tied up with the view, which she sees as historically produced from Kant to Existentialism, that there is no inherent purpose in human life. “We are simply here” with no larger purpose or telos (SGC: 79/364). But in the face of this purposelessness, being and becoming a morally good person through a suppression or transcendence of self is the best aspiration we can have.

Despite aligning with Sidgwick regarding the identification of morality solely with an appropriate focus on the other and the other’s welfare, not that of the self, Murdoch’s view differs from Sidgwick’s, as well as from much of the English empiricist tradition in ethics (Hutcheson, Hume, Mill), in three crucial respects. First, she pays very little attention to self-interest as an egoistic obstacle to morality through our unduly privileging our own interests over those of others. For Murdoch the prime self-oriented obstacle to morality is fantasy, which gets in the way of our seeing the other person as a distinct, separate, other being with their own reality. Sometimes the personal fantasy idea is bound up with self-absorption , which keeps us from being more than barely aware of others at all. More frequently it is our investment in false ideas of the (particular) other expressed in the fantasy idea. Neither of these, however, is self-interest as an overall motive or principle as Sidgwick envisages. All three (fantasy, self-absorption, self-interest) are egoistic but in distinct ways.

A second difference from Sidgwick (and from Butler, Hume, and Hutcheson, and the empiricist temper of British philosophy more generally) is Murdoch’s understanding of moral realism. She is viewing morality not only as calling for a greater focus on the well-being of others rather than the self, but saying that doing so involves being in touch with, being responsive to, reality itself, while egoism involves living in falsehood, being out of touch with reality. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion” (SGC: 93/376). “The authority of morality is the authority of truth, that is, of reality” (SGC: 90f/374).

Diamond and Brewer both note that Murdoch shares with both Plato and Aristotle the view that reality is irreducibly evaluative (Diamond 2010, 59f; Brewer 2009: 152). The identification of the Real with the Good is a deep part of Murdoch’s view (Brewer 2009: 152). Murdoch recognizes that the view of reality as evaluatively inert (in addition to human life having no telos ) is an historical product, tied up with the rise of natural science, with Kant playing a particularly important role in solidifying it within the Western philosophic tradition (MGM 1992: 40). She views Kant as trying to rescue value and morality in the face of this scientistic view of reality (MGM 1992: 50), but she entirely rejects that (unPlatonic) view of reality. Diamond argues that in doing so she also rejects the related Kantian distinction between the theoretical domain and the practical domain (Diamond 2010: 73).

A third difference between Murdoch and the British tradition in ethics is that the latter largely fails to recognize the difficulty and psychic complexity, so central to Murdoch’s view, of knowing the (individual) other, and thus also often of knowing how to act toward them so as to bring about their well-being. The notion of “benevolence” as employed in that tradition is taken to imply that being motivated to help others is sufficient to bring about what is good for the other. Murdoch strongly rejects this view, since the benevolent sentiment and motive does not guarantee an understanding of the other’s reality and well-being.

Murdoch’s form of moral realism has spurred important and influential secondary literature that is more engaged than Murdoch herself with meta-ethical questions in the Anglo American tradition. Hilary Putnam credits Murdoch with the critique he develops of the fact/value dichotomy, focusing on what Murdoch calls “secondary moral words” (IP: 22/317) and “normative-descriptive words” (IP: 31/325; Putnam 2002: 34–35). (Bernard Williams later influentially referred to these as “thick” moral or evaluative concepts, such as cruel, rude, brave, courageous, generous, elegant [Williams 1985]). These terms possess descriptive content but are also evaluative, and often motivational, contrasting with the more abstract moral terms “good”, “right”, and “ought” that had dominated British moral philosophy through the 1950s, and that almost entirely lack the descriptive element. For Putnam there are evaluative facts (“Jane’s act was courageous”) that have no less standing as describing reality than a presumptively non-evaluative fact. Nor, he argues, can the reality reflected in the characterization be factored into two unrelated components joined together—an allegedly “purely descriptive” component, and an evaluation of the content in that component ( point 1 on the Hare list ). The two dimensions are inextricably “entangled”, Putnam argues (2002).

This view thus rejects a common moral non-cognitivist (but shared by some cognitivists) claim that moral properties always “supervene” on (that is, apply in virtue of) already-existing non-moral properties. Panizza and Setiya defend this implication of the existence of secondary moral terms (Panizza 2020; Setiya 2013). Panizza connects the rejection of supervenience with Murdoch’s view that our direct perception of moral properties is bound up with the ways that perception is deeply conceptual (Panizza 2020: 284–5; see also Setiya 2013).

Others have focused more distinctly on Murdoch’s view’s implications for practical reason. John McDowell developed a Murdochian-influenced moral realist view, in an influential 1979 paper “Virtue and Reason”, often also regarded as a founding essay in the contemporary virtue ethics tradition (and indeed McDowell sees his view [developed in other papers as well] as both Aristotelian and Murdochian) (McDowell 1979, 1998). (More on Murdoch and virtue below.)

McDowell says that to possess a virtue, such as kindness, is to possess “a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement which situations impose on behavior”. Its

deliverances…are cases of knowledge… [A] kind person knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity. (McDowell 1979 [1997: 142])

McDowell adds that the reasons for action in particular situations that moral perception cognizes cannot be derived from general principles but retain a particularistic dimension, also emphasized by Murdoch. (See “particularity” below.)

Setiya agrees with McDowell that for Murdoch reality as accurately cognized supplies agents with motivating reasons, including moral reasons, for action; this view thus constitutes a form of “moral internalism”. “Rationality belongs to full cognition of the facts” (Setiya 2013: 13). Setiya responds to the objection that a moral agent could apply a moral concept competently to a situation but be unmoved by the moral force of the thus-characterized situation. He notes that Murdoch speaks of

two senses of “knowing what a word means”, one connected with ordinary language and the other very much less so. (IP: 29/322)

The second sense is the deeper understanding on which her moral realism relies. And the deeper understanding can be both of a concept and of an individual person in the situation to which the concept is being applied (Setiya 2013: 9). Murdoch connects these points to an aspect of her perfectionism, implying the ideal of perfect understanding of both individuals and concepts.

But Setiya disagrees with McDowell’s view that the moral reality cognized by the moral agent must take the form of moral requirements and indeed, more broadly, with action-guiding features of situations (Setiya 2013: 11). Mylonaki criticizes McDowell on similar grounds and both she and Setiya take the “other persons” view of the moral reality Murdoch is concerned with (Mylonaki 2019; Setiya 2013: 11a). Mylonaki emphasizes, however, that cognizing that reality can give rise to reasons for action.

A final thread in Murdoch’s view of reality is that it is what metaphysics describes. She understands metaphysics as an all-encompassing view of a transcendent reality, of the universe, that the individual must then attempt to come to understand in order to work out her place in it (M&E 1957/EM: 70). In “Metaphysics and Ethics” she mentions Thomism, Hegelianism, and Marxism as examples. These metaphysical systems and pictures are deeply ethical and evaluative, but, she implies, also provide a broader conception of reality. In her 1950s essays, she defends metaphysical thinking not so much as true, as capturing reality, but as a coherent way of thinking about the moral endeavor of life that is excluded by the linguistic turn in philosophical ethics, and which thereby refutes (Hare’s) universal prescriptivism’s claim to be the sole moral theory consistent with “the language of morals”. She is sympathetic to some moral, political, and philosophical/analytic criticisms of metaphysical systems (especially that they can lose a sense of the value of the individual [M&E 1957/EM: 70; Antonaccio 1996: 115f], and an acknowledgment of ultimate contingency [MGM 1992: 490]). Nevertheless, her evolving moral views always leave room for some kind of transcendent structure beyond the individual that retains ethical authority over the moral agent. The title of her final summative work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, expresses this continuing role for metaphysics in her thinking about morality and reality. As Diamond argues, she is not thinking of “metaphysics” as a non-morally-informed enterprise, as it is sometimes understood. In that form, Diamond says, Murdoch would not think it positioned to dictate what possibilities are open to moral philosophy (Diamond 2010). A metaphysics of actual reality cannot avoid being morally informed.

The Platonic strand of moral reality can of course be seen as exemplifying the metaphysics strand, but the latter remains a more general idea within Murdoch’s complex overall view of moral reality. The “other persons” strand seems less metaphysical and thus contrary to the final strand. But Murdoch often speaks of the reality of other people in “transcendental” terms—transcending the individual ego—and this framing thereby retains an element important to her complex and shifting understanding of metaphysics. All three strands play a role in Murdoch’s thinking about (moral) reality, but the other persons and the Good are distinctly more prominent.

In addition to but interwoven with the differences mentioned, other persons, the Good, and metaphysics (or a particular metaphysical system or concept) also embody distinct metaphors for understanding moral reality. Murdoch often emphasizes the importance of metaphor in thinking, especially in philosophy where, in the analytic tradition, there is an often tacit assumption that any metaphorical use of language can be given a purely literal rendering. Murdoch entirely rejects this way of thinking about language and understanding and often talks of exploring metaphors.

Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition. (SGC: 77/363, and elsewhere 93f/377)

The “other persons” strand involves an image of a struggle of each moral agent to grasp the other person(s) in their particular world as distinct persons, as equally real as themselves. The metaphor of Good involves a reaching to an abstract and implied-to-be “higher” entity. The metaphor of “metaphysics” generally evokes an elaborated system within which the individual agent is placed. The metaphorical dimension (with the differences among the three) is integral to our understanding of each strand.

Murdoch’s form of moral realism has influenced a critique of the fact/value dichotomy; the development of a virtue-ethical form of moral realism focused on right-making characteristics prompting acts in the public world; and, more generally, debates about practical reason and reasons for action. But the significance of Murdoch’s philosophy, and in particular of her version of moral realism, for an understanding of morality significantly transcends those contributions. (Setiya recognizes that Murdoch herself is barely interested in reason or rationality [Setiya 2013], though she does very occasionally talk about reasons. She would not regard “practical rationality” as a welcome framework for her thought, even if her insights have bearing on what is currently understood by that notion. She says, in promotion of both her perfectionism and love as a central ethical concept, “‘Act lovingly’ will translate ‘Act perfectly’ whereas ‘Act rationally’ will not” [IP: 102/384].) Bakhurst argues that Murdoch’s moral realism is a substantive moral view, not a meta-ethical view as McDowell’s is (a rejection of point 7 , that philosophers can and should propound morally neutral views of morality) (Bakhurst 2020: 218). [ 4 ]

We may focus on two such contributions to moral philosophy connected to Murdoch’s moral realism: (A) an expanded conception of moral agency; (B) the notion of a “fabric of ethical being”.

On (A), Murdoch delineates a broader notion of moral agency than that involved in reasons internalism and the perception of or sensitivity to action-guiding reasons within situations. She seeks to demonstrate a form of moral agency that takes place solely in the mind of the agent with no expression in her behavior in the public world. She does so through an extended example in IP, which serves other purposes as well (especially the importance of the inner life for morality, against point 5 [the inner life is not very important for morality]), and is extensively cited in the secondary literature. The example is of M , the mother-in-law of D . Throughout D ’s marriage to M ’s son, M has viewed D as “pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile”. She feels her son has “married beneath him” (IP: 17/312). M behaves toward D without revealing her real opinions and feelings. Murdoch highlights this feature by imagining that D moves away or dies, and that M therefore comes to have no opportunity to engage in behavior directed at D.

M settles into her fixed picture of D . But something prompts her to reflect on her view, recognizing both her jealousy of D and her own snobbishness. She tries to look at the D she knew in a new way, and over time, as the result of her attempts to see D anew, her view of D changes.

D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous…not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful. (IP: 17–18/313)

Murdoch imagines that M ’s new view of D is accurate and truthful, recognizing that it need not be. Murdoch sees M ’s attempts to see D as exemplifying activity on M ’s part, though issuing in no outward behavior, activity that is moral in character. Murdoch concludes that our moral agency is not exhausted by our outward behavior, nor by outward behavior plus mental acts conceptually tied to outward behavior, like deciding, choosing, and deliberating. And the moral philosophy of her time did not leave any clear place for this purely inner moral activity of attention.

(B) Beyond her expansion of moral agency to include inner mental life, Murdoch proposes the notion of a person’s total moral being, which transcends agency itself. In discussing M she says that her inner mental acts of attention contribute to “a continuous fabric of being” (IP: 22/316) that she says

is shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessment of others, their conception of their own life, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny. (VCM 1956/EM: 80f)

In discussing the fabric of being idea, Diamond refers to “thoughts, jokes, patterns of attention, fantasies, imaginative explorations, and a thousand other things” (Diamond 2010: 72. See also Crary 2007: 47). In Metaphysics Murdoch says “Morality is and ought to be connected with the whole of our being”. (MGM 1992: 495).

Murdoch is saying that our thoughts, modes of speech, emotions, imaginings, contemplatings, and the like, are responses to our perceived reality, just as the exercise of moral agency is. If we are amused by someone making fun of a disabled person, that is part of our moral being; it reflects on us morally. Such responses are part of us, but are not always doings, exercisings of agency.

This metaphor of the fabric of being connects with Murdoch’s saying that morality is

something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. (IP: 37/329)

a key criticism of point 4 (morality consists fundamentally in choice-making in specifiable situations). We are in a constant state of moral formation, and we bring our fabric of being to (what we experience as) choice situations. Actions and other responses flow from the background fabric of being that has been constructed by this moral formation. This metaphor also connects with Murdoch’s defense of the moral importance of the inner life, of the individual’s consciousness, that is ignored or demoted in the moral philosophy of her time ( point 5 ), a development she thinks due partly to a partial misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s emphasis on public criteria for the meaning of concepts (IP 1970, e.g., 15/311; Wiseman 2020).

Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear how Murdoch is envisioning the moral formation that constructs the fabric of moral being. This unclarity emerges in Murdoch’s substituting seeing for doing as the core metaphor for human life’s most fundamental moral task. Her influential essay “The Idea of Perfection” is framed as a critique of Stuart Hampshire on this point. She sees Hampshire as articulating the most powerful case for placing action-in-the-world at the core of the moral enterprise. She suggests an alternative conception that uses a range of visual metaphors such as see, attention, perception, looking, and vision to express the fundamental task of morality. Her visual metaphors are definitely meant to retain an important place for action in the world, but to place it in a larger context than does Hampshire’s “doing” metaphor (see Moran 2012: 189). They thereby express the limitations of the practical reasoning approach to understanding Murdoch’s moral philosophy.

In particular, Murdoch employs “attention” (not entirely consistently) to mark the process by which this successful apprehension of reality—seeing—is brought about.

I have used the word “attention” which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent . (IP: 34/327; emphasis added)

Before discussing Murdoch’s notion of attention, some remarks about Weil are in order, because of her profound impact on Murdoch, not only in relation to attention. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher (though never a university professor), political activist, and, in her later (short) life a kind of Christian mystic. Murdoch encountered Weil’s writings in the early 1950s, and reviewed her Notebooks in 1956 (“Knowing the Void”). Murdoch mentions her only briefly in her earlier writings; Weil, unlike Sartre, was not a figure at all familiar to British philosophy of those years, and indeed she is still little known to Anglo-American philosophers (see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Simone Weil ). But as in the quote above, Murdoch always makes her debt to Weil evident. Weil influenced Murdoch’s turn to Platonism, and her particular interpretation of Plato. She certainly bolstered the continuing Christian elements in Murdoch’s thought, as well as Murdoch’s increasing invoking of mysticism as related to morality, especially in Metaphysics . She probably influenced Murdoch’s view of psychic energy (understood on a Freudian model) as “mechanical”, something to which we are subjected. And Murdoch made use of Weil’s notion of “void” as part her moral outlook in Metaphysics .

Weil also developed a quite original critique of Marxism that involved a strong emphasis on the dignity of manual work, an emphasis of Murdoch’s also, in her important political essay, “House of Theory”, from 1958. Murdoch refers to Weil frequently in Metaphysics , though only once in any sustained way. In 1976 she cited Weil’s Attente de Dieu ( Waiting for God ) as one of only three philosophical works that deeply influenced her. (The others are Plato’s Symposium and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling [Broackes 2012a: 17, note 42].)

But Weil’s strongest influence on Murdoch was in the idea of attention (Weil 1942 [1977]; 1973b). Weil’s view of attention had a strong religious dimension. The proper, ultimate object of attention is God, though persons and subject matters are also objects of attention. Weil’s notion of attention also involves a kind of passive waiting in readiness for a truth to be revealed, an emptying of oneself in preparation for receiving the object. Murdoch abandoned the religious aspect of Weil’s view of attention, as she also abandoned for herself the distinctly theistic aspects of Weil’s Christianity, and also adopted a more active conception of attention than Weil. (Forsberg argues that Murdoch’s view was closer to Weil’s regarding passivity/activity [Forsberg 2017]. See also Cordner 2016.) But their notions were otherwise similar. [ 5 ]

10. Murdoch on Attention

For Murdoch, attention involves activity on our part (more so than in Weil), directing the “just and loving gaze upon an individual reality”, as M ’s attempt to see D is meant to illustrate. Sometimes Murdoch suggests that seeing someone justly and lovingly is precisely what is involved in seeing them as they really are [IP: 28/321; OGG: 67/354].

But Murdoch does not regard mere accuracy as constituting this just and loving gaze (IP: 23/317). Learning more details about someone (that they like chocolate or are afraid of snakes) is not what attention as loving and just provides (Cordner 2016). Moreover, as illustrated by the character of Julius King in her novel Fairly Honorable Defeat , someone can be very perceptive, very tuned into aspects of other people’s reality, such as their vanity, and can use this knowledge to manipulate and harm those persons. Julius indeed is incapable of loving others at all, and his perceptiveness might involve accurate, but not just or loving, attention (FHD 1970).

As mentioned earlier, Murdoch thinks that fully recognizing and acknowledging that a given other person is as real as oneself does not come naturally to us. Our fantasies and self-absorption get in the way; getting past these obstacles is difficult and uncertain and constitutes a genuine moral achievement. Attention is the process by which we are potentially enabled to do so.

The “as real as oneself” formulation may be meant to capture two somewhat distinct strands in Murdoch’s view. One is the recognition of the other in her distinct otherness and difference from oneself, rather than in light of one’s projections onto the other that assimilate her to oneself. The second is that the other is seen as like oneself, for example as a human being, a person, a possessor of dignity. (Murdoch implies but does not articulate this second strand.) Murdoch wants both these strands in what constitutes a moral take on the other, and “just and loving attention”, even if it does not seem equivalent to “appreciating that others are as real as oneself”, should probably be understood as encompassing both. (Chappell adds a third strand, what it is like to be that other person [Chappell 2018: 103].)

Attention is thus a process by which human persons are enabled to access moral reality. The process is both cognitive and perceptual (Murdoch does not attempt to work out their relationship to one another) but for Murdoch those capacities are also moral in character. Our moral capacities are part of our cognitive capacities, enabling, and required for us to see, the moral and evaluative aspects of reality. [ 6 ]

Murdoch’s (and through her, Weil’s) view of (loving) attention as the core moral capacity influenced the development of care ethics, especially in its early (and continuing) form as a type of feminist ethical outlook (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Grimshaw 1986; Ruddick 1989; Walker 1989; Bowden 1997). Care ethics emphasizes attentiveness and concern for the other person in her particularity, informed by knowledge of the specific needs, desires, and situation of that other person, in contrast to emphasizing a universal category such as “person” or “human being” as the appropriate target of attention and care. Murdoch’s emphasis on the reality of the particular other as the target of loving attention was drawn on to develop this form of ethical theory.

In addition both care ethics and Murdoch tend to see personal relationships as the primary domain of morality. Murdoch’s focus on personal fantasy as a prime obstacle to grasping the other’s reality suggests that she is envisioning persons with whom we have a personal relationship. But her language sometimes suggests a broader scope, perhaps to persons known to oneself but with whom one does not have a personal relationship, or even the broader category of persons one encounters in a fleeting way (e.g., fellow riders on the subway). She seldom suggests that it means needy or suffering persons distant from oneself, or members of a general category (e.g., victims of Covid). Something like that idea surfaces only in Metaphysics , where Murdoch associates it with utilitarianism.

Varieties of care ethics arose to encompass less personal forms of relationship, and some also expanded this focus to take account of institutions and structures in which care relationships do, or should, take place (Tronto 1993; Bowden 1997; Norlock 2019). Murdoch never goes in this institutional direction. At the same time, the centrality of the visual metaphor in Murdoch—attention, seeing, looking, vision—does not sit comfortably with the emphasis in much care ethics, especially in its feminist form, on the sustaining of ongoing personal relationships involving mutuality and reciprocity, and more generally on the fundamentally relational character of the self. The attentive self is not portrayed by Murdoch as actively engaging with the attended-to other in a reciprocal relationship. In Metaphysics , she actively defends the standing-apart of the moral subject against the engaged relationality present in the Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s views (MGM 1992, ch 15: 361–380. See Cordner 2019 discussion). (Murdoch’s overall relationship to feminism is complex. For extended treatments, see Lovibond 2011; Bolton forthcoming).

One Murdochian strand in care ethics that has been influential outside the care ethics context is particularity—an emphasis on the limits of universal principle and impersonality to capture the substance of appropriate moral response. This particularity takes two forms, or at least two emphases, one on the particularity of situations—the (alleged) impossibility of coming up with a set of general moral principles or a moral code that will always prescribe the right action (McDowell’s emphasis, and the focus of what is called “particularism” [Hooker & Little 2000]). The other is on the particularity of persons as objects of moral attention and concern. (There are other typologies of particularism. See Driver 2012.) Both dimensions are present in Murdoch’s thought and in care ethics, and the person-focus is more central to both Murdoch and care ethics. Millgram finds a resource for particularism in Murdoch’s emphasis on finding the best description of a situation (Millgram 2002), but situation-particularity remains within the “action/reasons for action” framework that Murdoch definitively transcends, and person-particularity is crucial for her doing so.

For Murdoch, just and loving attention, seeing the other as equally real as oneself is a difficult and infrequent moral achievement. She delineates three different stages involving attention, each yielding obstacles to its realization. First, an agent may fail to notice that an effort of attention is called for. As Murdoch says, “I can only choose within the world I can see” (IP: 37/329). What we notice, what registers with us, is an integral part of our fabric of moral being. If an agent fails to see a morally relevant feature of a person nearby (e.g., their distress), this feature will not become part of her subjectively perceived world and she will not even attempt to focus on this other person as part of an attempt at proffering just and loving attention.

But even if she does notice the morally relevant feature of the other and decides to make that attempt, as for example M does with respect to D , she may not be able to do so. Because of fantasies and resentments toward the other, or just self-absorption, the moral agent may simply not be capable of focusing on the other person beyond a very superficial level. She may genuinely try, but end up with the wrong target occupying her mind.

Third, even if the agent is able to direct her attention to the other person, she may be unsuccessful in making that attention a just and loving take on that other person. Try as she might with all sincerity (which she is unable to muster at the second stage) her fantasies about that other person, and her fabric of being more generally, may keep her from seeing the other as she really is.

Notice that “attention” is used in two different ways in this account. The first is focusing on another as part of an attempt to proffer just and loving attention. (Call this “attempt attention”, attention in its mode as an attempt at just and loving attention). The second is successfully proffering such just and loving attention. (Call this “success attention”, attention in its mode as a successful attempt.)

Only if the three hurdles are cleared has the agent achieved the success attention that Murdoch thinks morality demands. Various aspects of the agent’s fabric of ethical being can prevent that moral achievement.

We must therefore look more closely into how Murdoch understands moral formation, the creation of agents’ fabric of ethical being. She says that over time our attendings (another term for attempt attention) build up the (subjective) structures of value that largely constitute our fabric of being.

[I]f we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up the structures of value round about us…; (IP: 37/329) [O]ur ability to act well “when the time comes” depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of attention. (OGG: 56/345; see also 67/354, 69/356, 91f/375) [ 7 ]

Murdoch is implying that by our efforts of attending to various objects (attempt attention), especially other persons, bringing them into our active mental universe, we build up the evaluative structures of our subjectively experienced or perceived world, and create our fabric of ethical being. This sets the stage for attempts at loving attention and (less frequent) successes in proffering such loving attention.

But the idea that our fabric of being and subjective structures of value are built up almost solely or even primarily through acts of attempt attention seems at odds with Murdoch’s Freudian/Kantian/Schopenhauerian moral psychology, which implies that the main forces creating our fabric of being are fantasies, other distortions, and egoistic desires infrequently aligned with moral ways of being. These do indeed build up structures of value and ways of perceiving reality. They are not merely forces operating in a mechanical way on the agent’s will, pulling her away from moral action and perception, although this dualistic image is one Murdoch often employs for the human psyche. But the values and ways of perceiving built up by these forces are usually morally bad or at least unworthy. An example from Murdoch’s novels is Julius King, the character referred to earlier, who sees many other persons in a particular way, contemptuously—Murdoch somewhat implies that he is morally damaged from being a concentration camp survivor—and often treats his acquaintances and even friends in a malicious and contemptuous way, arising from the valuational framework (part of his fabric of ethical being) within which he views them (FHD 1970). Although Murdoch’s predominant view of the psyche implies that egoistic forces do much to create our fabric of being, within which our capability for success attention comprises but a weak reed, she does not actually adopt this view. Rather she takes the view that our active, deliberate attendings (attempt attention) are the prime source of our subjective structures of value and fabric of moral being.

Thus Murdoch’s stated view privileges what can be seen as the active dimension of value or moral formation, while her theory of the psyche should have pointed her (also) toward the passive aspects thereof. Cora Diamond suggests that the “fabric of being” metaphor mixes active and passive (Diamond 2010: 72). And in a 1966 essay, “The Darkness of Practical Reason”, Murdoch criticizes Hampshire for an overly sharp distinction between passive aspects of mental life (represented by desires and fears that are not thought-dependent) and the active choosing will, aided by reason’s surveying the facts of the agent’s situation enabled by an active stepping back from that situation, that decides and takes action (DPR 1966/EM: 201). She sees (attempt) attention, and also imagination, as falling into neither of these categories. So in this particular “active/passive” framework attempt attention does not fall in the “active” category.

Nevertheless, Murdoch still sees moral agents as in genuine if limited control of their attendings. In this sense, attempt attention does fall into the “active” category, thus contrasting with the action-centric view of agency and freedom she criticizes in existentialist and analytic moral philosophies and psychologies. This attempt attention contrasts with the Freudian intrapsychic forces that contribute to our moral formation without engaging our agency in that way. And at least in one place she recognizes a form of passivity that is connected with a person’s fabric of being, in contrast with aspects of our mental or psychic universe that are not. In discussing Hampshire, she attributes to him recognition that a Freudian explanation or understanding of, say, a fear

enables us to attach the fear intelligibly to a more clearly seen structure of motivation which we may endorse or at any rate accept as ours. (DPR 1966/EM: 196)

This contrasts with a fear that besieges us but whose character we repudiate, or at least do not accept. Thus Murdoch’s view that our attendings shape our moral formation and world of perceived values draws on a view of activity reduced in scope from the Hampshirean concept, yet still distinguishable from a form of passivity that she recognizes (at least here) as part of our moral being. It is in this sense of “active” that she privileges the active (attempt attendings) over the passive in her explicit account of the formation of our fabric of moral being, resulting in the passive dimension not receiving adequate attention (Blum 2012).

Murdoch’s failure to theorize passive forces in moral formation is also expressed in a striking absence of attention to the distinctly social sources of negative moral formation. An important part of how moral formation is, as she says, going on all the time, how our fabric of being is always being constructed, arises from social rather than intrapsychic factors, for example, representations of categories of persons that block or hinder agents’ abilities to see the reality of persons in those groups. As a member of a given society, or particular subcultures within that society, we are subjected to stereotypes and other misleading representations of different groups of people, with whom we do or do not come in contact. The stereotypes are attached to race, gender, class, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, gender expression, professions and occupations, residence in certain neighborhoods or regions, and other social groups. These “figurations”, as Diana Meyers usefully calls them, are almost always evaluative in character (Meyers 1994). Thus they contribute to social agents’ evaluative take on the world and to the formation of their moral being. They affect whether we do, or try to, have loving attention, respect, compassion, and even mere acknowledgment toward individual members of those groups. In this respect figurations are comparable to the fantasies and other forms of egoism that Murdoch points to that block loving attention—except that they affect our responses to people unknown to us much more than these Freudian intrapsychic forces do. Social stereotypes are not the only form of socially-produced barrier to loving attention, but they are important and can represent the larger category for our purposes. [ 8 ]

We are largely passive with respect to the impact of these figurations on our moral being, often not even recognizing their existence, as recent work on “implicit bias”—unconscious ways we see members of particular groups in negative or positive lights (Saul & Brownstein 2016)—demonstrates. [ 9 ] We do not generally choose to embrace these figurations of the groups in question, nor are they generally (though perhaps they can sometimes be) generated through (attempt) attention towards groups or individuals. If we notice them at all, we often just find ourselves possessing them (Blum 2012).

Social figurations may not clear the bar for contributions to our moral formation that Murdoch sets up in the quote above from DPR. They may seem more like a fear that we do not endorse. Indeed figurations can be a source of such fears, such as a stereotype of black males as threatening, and can function even if the agent has not embraced their cognitive content. Murdoch’s notion of “fabric of being” is never sufficiently defined so as to make entirely clear whether any item in our mental universe is actually excluded from it. But we can rely on an intuitive sense that if a stereotype substantially affects how the agent perceives and experiences persons of group X , and the agent has not attempted to rid herself of the stereotype or neutralize its effect on her, then the stereotype contributes to or is part of her moral being (as a passive factor).

These social forces, explored by the more recent development of “social epistemology”, complement the intrapsychic ones as passive contributors to moral formation. The “going on all the time” that constitutes our moral formation and being is a complex combination of passive and active elements and processes. In several essays in the late 1950s Murdoch mentions the idea of “convention”, and sometimes sees conventions or conventional thinking as a barrier to adequate perception (Holland 2012). But convention does not capture the idea of distinct figurations of particular groups of persons that are powerful forces in the culture and society harming social beings’ ability to see the reality of members of those specific groups. These obstacles have an entirely different source than the intrapsychic forces with which Murdoch is concerned (Clarke 2012: 244f; Blum 2012). The two can complement and interact, as M ’s class-based snobbery makes common cause with her jealousy of D to cast the latter in the negative light that Murdoch describes. There is strong support in Murdoch’s writing for Nussbaum’s claim that

Murdoch seems almost entirely to lack interest in the political and social determinants of a moral vision and in the larger social critique that ought…to be a major element in the struggle against one’s own defective tendencies. (Nussbaum 2001: 32)

This is not, however, to deny Clarke’s point that Murdoch’s view of attention and moral perception leave room for self-reflective criticism within which such a social critique could be lodged (Clarke 2012). But the point is not only that Murdoch neglects social and political factors in moral formation but that her privileging of the active and neglecting the passive is a theoretical underpinning of this neglect.

Murdoch’s stated view that our attempt attention is the virtually sole source of our fabric of being suggests an ambiguity in what she means when she says that morality or moral life is “something that goes on continually” (IP: 37/329), not only in moments of actional choice. She definitely means that moral activity is going on all the time, a view connected with her expanding the domain of “activity” beyond its conventional understanding as the public world of action, to include the inner life. She wants to say that in between public act-and-choice situations we are continually active mentally in our attempt attention and our imagination.

But she also wants to say that the moral formation that produces our fabric of being is going on all the time. This opens up the larger issue of the range of factors that contribute to moral formation, beyond attempt attention. Murdoch may partly be blinded to the passive forces in this category by a failure to keep clearly distinct the claims that moral activity goes on continually and that moral formation goes on continually. But her vital moral insight of the “fabric of being” metaphor requires taking account of the full range of contributions to that fabric of being, passive as well as active.

Murdoch generally presents seeing moral reality as a difficult and lengthy mental, emotional, and spiritual achievement, never able to be fully accomplished. The defeat or transcendence of the ego is something the agent must continually work at. This idea of a spiritual journey toward moral seeing looms even larger in Metaphysics . However, Murdoch also wants to leave room for rare persons for whom appreciating the Good and the reality of other people is not achieved primarily through struggle and challenge. As she says in a oft-quoted passage, “[I]t must be possible to do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant” (IP: 2/300). (The latter is not an auspicious formulation, as “peasants”, even if uneducated, can still be reflective and intentional in seeking the Good.) Murdoch follows Schopenhauer, an important historical figure for her, in marveling at meeting that rare someone in whom “the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self”, so ubiquitous in human nature, are absent [SGC: 103/385]. Of course, this is not to deny that any virtuous person must sometimes have to suppress anti-moral desire, or to struggle to see other persons in their full reality. Even if the difference is one of degree, the “constant struggle” image is quite different from the virtuous peasant, and Murdoch wants to leave room for both.

Murdoch speaks often of virtue, and she has been treated as an early virtue theorist. Her Sovereignty essays were given exposure by inclusion in some early and canonical virtue ethics collections (MacIntyre & Hauerwas 1983; Crisp & Slote 1997). While she may well have helped spur interest in virtue within moral philosophy, she is not a virtue theorist. She is not putting forward a view that virtue is a more fundamental moral concept than other concepts, nor is she claiming that approaching right action through the lens of virtue is superior to doing so through a Kantian/deontological or utilitarian approach. She does not offer an “ethical theory” in either of these senses. Her invocation of virtue reflects an unsystematized recognition that virtue is part of the toolbox we use to understand the moral domain of life, as are attention, perception, love, unselfishness, and (in Metaphysics ) duty. She joined with virtue theory in helping to expand the scope of ethics beyond procedures and principles of right action to include how it is good to live and to be (against point 5 ).

15. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

It is not possible to provide a full discussion of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in this entry, nor of Murdoch’s evolving views on art and literature, religion, politics, concepts, and the nature of philosophy, all of which bear on her view of morality. When Metaphysics treats issues of morality, most of what it says is in the spirit of her earlier moral writings, or extends it, though sometimes quite significantly. There is a great deal more emphasis in Metaphysics on purification of the individual consciousness—purifying it of its egoism—and the Platonic “ascent” to that purification, as a core moral task; but that idea is present in Sovereignty also. She also much more frequently connects morality with mysticism, spirituality, and religion. She also retains the idea that we construct our moral world through mental activity, but in Metaphysics she sometimes shifts that activity from attention to Eros, or energy (“[W]e are always deploying and directing our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it”. [MGM 1992: 495; emphasis in original]), and sometimes to imagination (MGM 1992: 322).

However, in Metaphysics Murdoch amends her moral philosophy in one quite substantial way. She now thinks the moral life cannot do without duty, and that duty is not simply an expression of moral vision or attention. She says that there are several different “modes of ethical being” besides moral vision/attention/Eros/purification, that co-exist with it in a larger “field of force”, involving tension between the different modes (MGM 1992: 492). Duty is the most important of these. Her conception of duty is like Kant’s in certain respects and contrary to it in others.

Duties, as Kant said, present absolute moral requirements. They are available as a bridle on contrary inclination without being routed through the individual’s moral sensibility. They can thereby “introduce order and calmness” (MGM 1992: 494). They do not leave room for flexibility of interpretation by the agent’s moral character (Hopwood 2019: 250).

But, contra Kant, duties are unsystematic, not necessarily connected with one another. The reason for not lying is different from that for not stealing. They are not all expressions of a more general principle or procedure, like the categorical imperative. Murdoch recognizes but rejects Schopenhauer’s and Wittgenstein’s view that “duty”, especially when viewed (as Murdoch does), as an unconnected “list”, is a holdover from a theological view “as arbitrary orders given by God” (MGM 1992: 301f, 303).

Murdoch is aware that this conception of duty applies more fully to “negative duties” than positive ones. “‘Don’t lie’ is a clearer command than ‘be truthful’” (MGM 1992: 302). However, although the latter does not have the clarity of direction of the former, both possess an immediate availability to the agent.

Murdoch also rejects Kant’s view that duty is the whole of morality, as she rejects Schopenhauer’s view that morality can rest solely on compassion and eschew duty (MGM 1992: 292). Purification of consciousness remains the “fundamental ‘arena’” of morality (MGM 1992: 293). The “dutiful man” may be “content with too little”, following a rule without imagining that more is required (MGM 1992: 494), more that must arise from another mode of ethical being.

Murdoch recognizes something like dutiful action in Sovereignty , when she speaks of everyday acts that we perform simply as any moral agent, and for publicly obvious reasons [IP: 43/334]. But there she does not frame these actions as “duty” as she develops that notion in MGM, but as expressions of moral perception. In Sovereignty she lacks the idea that “the concept of duty remains with us as a steady moral force” (MGM 1992: 494).

The notion of duty is connected with a third “mode of moral being”, part of the field of force constituted by all these modes, that she calls “axioms”. Axioms are roughly the political counterpart of duties, the latter understood as operating in the terrain of personal behavior (Antonaccio 2000: 159). Axioms are (relatively) fixed and unavoidable constraints and requirements governing behavior in the political domain. Like duties, they do not form a system, but are distinct in their individual character, as illustrated by Murdoch’s most frequent example of an axiom-type, that of rights. She mentions, for example, the right to happiness, the right to vote, rights animals have (presumably not to be made to suffer), and the rights of women. Even if all are rights, they have different valuational characters. Axioms operate by being regarded as readily understood unconditional and inviolable standards, and so can be invoked and expect to be honored (Browning 2019: 185).

In contrast to (though not strictly incompatible with) what she says about duties, axioms are historical products, and this is connected with their being unsystematic and piecemeal. Women’s coming to be seen as having equal rights with men might not have happened, but it did, and now (Murdoch thinks) equal rights for women has the status of an axiom. Axioms are products of genuine, if historically contingent, moral insight.

In MGM , Murdoch sees the individual-moral and the political domains as governed by very different norms and principles, each needing to be protected from too much influence from the other.

Liberal political thought posits a certain fundamental distinction between the person as citizen and the person as moral-spiritual individual. (MGM 1992: 357)

She sees the individual-moral domain (notably excluding duty) as governed by a ‘perfectionism’ that is continuous from Sovereignty to Metaphysics . The aspiration to the highest moral goodness is the proper aim of the human person. By contrast, the polity cannot be ‘perfected’; its proper aim is to be ‘decent’ (MGM 1992: 356), to try to limit the evil contained therein (MGM 1992: 368, from Simone Weil). This view is a radical departure from Murdoch’s political thinking in her fascinating 1958 essay, “A House of Theory”, her only pre- Metaphysics political philosophy writing. There, and in occasional remarks in Sovereignty , Murdoch sees moral ideas and ideals as the appropriate normative source for sociopolitical arrangements—for example, as in “House”, the ideas of dignity in work, and the communal bonds of work. In Metaphysics this view is largely (not entirely) rejected (Blum forthcoming).

Though, in contrast to duties and moral vision, axioms concern the political rather than the individual-moral realm, Murdoch conceives of them as part of the fabric of moral being. They bear on individual conduct through the individual’s status as a citizen, wherein we recognize, support, and honor human rights, though it is the state that adopts policies that officially recognize rights (and other axioms). Civic morality is part of the individual’s moral being. The inclusion of the political as a distinct aspect of moral thinking and being does not take Murdoch in the direction of envisioning the human person as deeply embedded in a rich web of social/institutional relationships that shape her moral being and her moral requirements—for example, in social role relationships, as explored in her friend Dorothy Emmet’s 1966 Rules, Roles, and Relations (Emmet 1996). Alasdair MacIntyre (Emmet’s student and collaborator) makes this point in a review of Metaphysics :

[W]hat is absent is any conception of the achievement of the Good as a task for human beings in community, so that the transformation of the self has to be a transformation of social relationships. (MacIntyre 1993: 2)

The pluralistic conception of morality in the field of force idea goes beyond the rejection of a single principle governing conduct, such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, or certain versions of virtue theory. These monistic views concern only conduct, and their rejection (discussed earlier in relation to McDowell’s Murdochian Aristotelianism) leaves in place, in Sovereignty, a unity involved in the idea of moral vision/purification of consciousness. The pluralism in Metaphysics’s modes of ethical being idea rejects a unity of that sort as well, seeing the purification of consciousness as only one, though the most significant, aspect of morality in the overall “field of force” of our ethical being (Hopwood 2019).

Only one of her 26 novels is listed: A Fairly Honorable Defeat .

• 1953 [1987], Sartre: Romantic Rationalist , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reprinted with a new, substantial, introduction by Murdoch, New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
• [FHD] 1970, A Fairly Honorable Defeat , New York: Penguin, 1970.
• [SG] 1970, The Sovereignty of Good , New York: Routledge, 1970.
• 1977, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists , Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in [EM], pp. 386–463.
• [MGM] 1992, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals , New York: Penguin.
• [EM] 1997, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature , Peter Conradi (ed.), New York: Penguin Books.

A.2 Articles

• [KV] 1956, “‘Knowing the Void’: Review of Simone Weil’s Notebooks ”, The Spectator , November 1956: 613–614; reprinted in [EM], pp. 157–160.
• [VCM] 1956, “Vision and Choice in Morality”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume: Dreams and Self-Knowledge , 30: 32–58; reprinted in [EM], pp. 76–98.
• [M&E] 1957, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in D. F. Pears (ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics , London: Macmillan, 1957: 99–123; reprinted in [EM], pp. 59–75.
• [HT] 1958, “A House of Theory”, in N. Mckenzie (ed.), Conviction , London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958: 218–33; reprinted in [EM], pp. 171–186.
• [SBL] 1959, “The Sublime and the Good”, in Chicago Review , 1959: 42–55; reprinted in [EM], pp. 205–220.
• [IP] 1964 [1970/1997], “The Idea of Perfection”, 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture in the University College of North Wales, first published 1964, The Yale Review , 53(3): 342–380. Collected in [SG], pp. 1–45; reprinted in [EM], pp. 299–336.
• [DPR] 1966, “The Darkness of Practical Reason: Review of Stuart Hampshire’s Freedom of the Individual ”, Encounter , July 1966: 46–50; reprinted in [EM], pp. 193–202.
• [SGC] 1967 [1970/1997], “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”, Leslie Stephen Lecture, 14 November 1967, first published as a pamphlet by Cambridge University Press, 1967. Collected in [SG], pp. 77–104; reprinted in [EM], 363–385.
• [OGG] 1969 [1970/1997], “On ‘God’ and ‘Good”, first published in 1969, The Anatomy of Knowledge; Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity, Bowdoin College, 1965 and 1966 , Marjorie Grene (ed.), Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Collected in [SG], pp. 46–76; reprinted in [EM], pp. 337–362.

A.3 Interviews

• 1977, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee”, in Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas , London: BBC Books; reprinted in [EM], pp. 3–30.
• 2003, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch , Gillian Dooley (ed.), Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. A collection of 23 interviews by many people over the course of Murdoch’s life.

B.1 Cited Works

• Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958 [1997], “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Philosophy , 33(124): 1–19; reprinted in Crisp and Slote 1997: 26–44. doi:10.1017/S0031819100037943
• Antonaccio, Maria, 1996, “Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics”, in Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996: 110–137.
• –––, 2000, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2012, “The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings”, in Broackes 2012b: 155–180.
• Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker (eds.), 1996, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bakhurst, David, 2020, “Analysis and Transcendence in The Sovereignty of Good”, European Journal of Philosophy , 28(1): 214–223. doi:10.1111/ejop.12539
• Bayley, John, 1999, Elegy for Iris , New York: Picador.
• Blum, Lawrence, 2012, “Visual Metaphors in Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy”, in Broackes 2012b: 307–324.
• –––, forthcoming, “Murdoch and Politics”, in Hopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Bolton, Lucy, forthcoming, “Murdoch and Feminism”, in Hopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Bowden, Peta, 1997, Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1998, “Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings”, European Journal of Philosophy , 6(1): 59–77. doi:10.1111/1468-0378.00050
• Brewer, Talbot, 2009, The Retrieval of Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Broackes, Justin, 2012a, “Introduction”, in Broackes 2012b: 1–92.
• ––– (ed.), 2012b, Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Browning, Gary (ed.), 2018a, Murdoch on Truth and Love , Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan.
• –––, 2018b, Why Iris Murdoch Matters , London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• –––, 2019, The Metaphysics of Morals and Politics (MGM ch 12), in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 179–194.
• Chappell, Sophie-Grace, 2018, “Love and Knowledge in Murdoch”, in Browning 2018a: 89–108.
• Clarke, Bridget, 2012, “Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception”, in Broackes 2012b: 227–253.
• Conradi, Peter J., 1986 [2001], Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist , Basingstoke: Macmillan; third edition printed as The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch , London: HarperCollins, 2001.
• –––, 2001, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch , London: HarperCollins.
• Cordner, Christopher, 2009, “Waiting, Patience and Love”, in Ghassan Hage (ed.), Waiting , Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 169–183.
• –––, 2016, “Lessons of Murdochian Attention”, Sophia , 55(2): 197–213. doi:10.1007/s11841-016-0540-2
• –––, 2019, “Vision and Encounter in Moral Thinking”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 209–226.
• Diamond, Cora, 1996, “We Are Perpetually Moralists: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value”, in Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996.
• –––, 2010, “Murdoch the Explorer”, Philosophical Topics , 38(1): 51–85.
• Crary, Alice, 2007, Beyond Moral Judgment , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote (eds.), 1997, Virtue Ethics , London: Oxford University Press.
• Dooley, Gillian and Nora Hämäläinen (eds.), 2019, Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals , Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Driver, Julia, 2012, “’For every Foot its own shoe’: Method and Moral Theory in the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch”, in Broackes 2012b: 293–306.
• Emmet, Dorothy, 1966, Rules, Roles, and Relations , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• –––, 1979, The Moral Prism , London: MacMillan.
• –––, 1994, The Role of the Unrealisable: A Study in Regulative Ideals , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• –––, 1996, Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of Seventy Years in Philosophy , London: Macmillan.
• Flynn, Thomas, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
• Forsberg, Niklas, 2017, “M and D and Me: Iris Murdoch and Stanley Cavell on Perfectionism and Self-Transformation”, Iride: Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate , 2017(2): 361–372.
• Grimshaw, Jean, 1986, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hämäläinen, Nora, 2019, “Which Void? (MGM chapter 18)”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 261–275.
• Hampshire, Stuart, 1959 [1982], Thought and Action , London: Chatto and Windus; new edition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
• –––, 1965, Freedom of the Individual , New York: Harper and Row.
• Hare, R.M., 1952, The Language of Morals , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Holland, Margaret G., 1998, “Touching the Weights: Moral Perception and Attention”, International Philosophical Quarterly , 38(3): 299–312. doi:10.5840/ipq199838324
• –––, 2012, “Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom”, in Broackes 2012b: 255–274.
• Hooker, Brad and Margaret Little (eds.), 2000, Moral Particularism , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hopwood, Mark, 2018, “‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency”, European Journal of Philosophy , 26(1): 477–501. doi:10.1111/ejop.12260
• –––, 2019, “Fields of Force: Murdoch on Axioms, Duties, and Eros (MGM chapter 17)”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 243-260.
• Hopwood, Mark and Silvia Panizza (eds.), forthcoming, The Murdochian Mind , New York: Routledge.
• Lipscomb, Benjamin J.B., 2021, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197541074.001.0001
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• –––, 2020, “The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement , 87: 181–200. doi:10.1017/S1358246119000195
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• –––, 1998, Mind, Value, and Reality , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Meyers, Diana T., 1994, Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy , New York: Routledge.
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• Moran, Richard, 2012, “Iris Murdoch and Existentialism”, in Broackes 2012b: 181–196.
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• Nussbaum, Martha, 1990, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2001, “When She was Good/Iris Murdoch: Novelist and Philosopher” The New Republic , 31 December 2001 and 7 January 2002. [ Nussbaum 2001 available online ].
• Panizza, Silvia, 2020, “Moral Perception Beyond Supervenience: Iris Murdoch’s Radical Perspective”, The Journal of Value Inquiry , 54(2): 273–288. doi:10.1007/s10790-019-09695-4
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• Williams, Bernard, 1985, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wiseman, Rachael, 2020, “What If the Private Linguist Were a Poet? Iris Murdoch on Privacy and Ethics”, European Journal of Philosophy , 28(1): 224–234. doi:10.1111/ejop.12538
• Wolf, Susan, 2014, “Loving Attention: Lessons in Love From The Philadelphia Story ”, in Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction , Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 369–386. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384512.003.0017

B.2 Other Secondary Literature

• Altorf, Hannah Marije, 2008, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining , New York: Continuum.
• Antonaccio, Maria, 2012a, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2012b, “The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings”, in Broackes 2012b: 155–180.
• Bagnoli, Carla, 2012, “The Exploration of Moral Life”, in Broackes 2012b: 197–226.
• Blum, Lawrence A., 1986 [1994], “Iris Murdoch and the Domain of the Moral”, Philosophical Studies , 50(3): 343–367; reprinted in Blum 1994: 12–29. doi:10.1007/BF00353837
• –––, 1991 [1994], “Moral Perception and Particularity”, Ethics , 101(4): 701–725; reprinted in Blum 1994: 30–61. doi:10.1086/293340
• –––, 1994, Moral Perception and Particularity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511624605
• Bronzwaer, W., 1988, “Images of Plato in ‘The Fire and the Sun’ and ‘Acastos’”, in R. Todd (ed.), Encounters with Iris Murdoch: Proceedings of an Informal Symposium on Iris Murdoch’s Work held at the Free University, Amsterdam, on 20 and 21 October 1986 , Amsterdam: Free University Press: 55–67.
• Foot, Philippa, 1978, Virtues and Vices , Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
• Forsberg, Niklas, 2013, Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse , New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Emmet, Dorothy, 1945, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking , London: MacMillan.
• Gaita, Raimond, 2004, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception , second edition, New York: Routledge.
• Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Gomes, Anil, forthcoming, “Moral Vision”, in Hopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Hare, R.M., 1963, Freedom and Reason , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Jordan, Jessy E. G., 2013, “Thick Ethical Concepts in the Philosophy and Literature of Iris Murdoch”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy , 51(3): 402–417. doi:10.1111/sjp.12037
• Laverty, Megan, 2007, Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2019, “Iris Murdoch as Educator”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 125–144.
• Lloyd, Genevieve, 1982, “Iris Murdoch on the Ethical Significance of Truth”, Philosophy and Literature , 6(1–2): 62–75. doi:10.1353/phl.1982.0006
• Lovibond, Sabina, 1983, Realism and Imagination in Ethics , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Midgley, Mary, 2005, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203027394
• Noddings, 1984 [2013], Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2012, “‘Faint With Secret Knowledge’: Love and Vision in Murdoch's The Black Prince ”, in Broackes 2012b: 135–154.
• Rowe, Anne, 2019, Iris Murdoch , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
• Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Vice, Samantha, 2007, “Self-Concern in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good ”, in Anne Rowe (ed.), Iris Murdoch: A Re-Assessment , London: Palgrave Macmillan, 60–71.
• Weil, Simone, 1952 [1957], “Dieu dans Platon” Intuitions pré-chrétiennes , Paris, La Colombe, Editions du Vieux Colombier, 1951; translated as “God in Plato”, in Elizabeth C. Geissbuhler (ed.) Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957, ch. 7: 74–88.
• White, Frances, 2014, Becoming Iris Murdoch , Kingston-upon-Thames: Kingston University.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Iris Murdoch Review .
• Iris Murdoch Research Centre , University of Chichester; publishes the Iris Murdoch Review and hosts the Iris Murdoch Society.
• Women In Parenthesis , a study of the collective corpus of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch.

attention | cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | ethics: virtue | existentialism | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | Foot, Philippa | Hare, Richard Mervyn | moral particularism | moral realism | Sartre, Jean-Paul | -->social-epistemology --> | Weil, Simone

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to Megan Laverty, Vic Seidler, and Kieran Setiya for acute and incredibly helpful feedback on a late draft of this entry, and equally for their support. I would also like to thank Vic and Megan for our “Murdoch study group” over the past years, and to the “Murdoch reading group”, organized and guided by Mark Hopwood, during the covid period. Many thanks also to SEP editor Stephen Darwall for excellent suggestions.

Copyright © 2022 by Lawrence Blum < lawrence . blum @ umb . edu >

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Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work, iris murdoch, british novelist and philosopher, by taylor jasmine | on october 24, 2019 | updated april 26, 2024 | comments (0).

Dame Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 – February 8, 1999), the prolific British novelist, philosopher, and playwright was a master of blending psychological depth and dark humor into her fiction and nonfiction works. 

Born Jean Iris Murdoch in Dublin, Ireland, her father was a World War I veteran and civil servant. Her mother was a former singer. When Murdoch was a newborn, her family moved to London so her father could take a British government position. She remained an only child. 

The 2001 Academy Award and BAFTA Award-winning film Iris is based on her life and marriage to John Bayley, a writer and English professor, and her struggles with dementia.

In a 1990 interview with The Paris Review , Murdoch praised her family as a “felicitous trinity” though she knew her mother gave up singing professionally for marriage.

She also said, “I knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. I mean, when I was a child I knew that.” Recognition that her mother’s ambition was subsumed to the time’s gender norms likely fueled Murdoch to achieve.

. . . . . . . . .

Iris Murdoch biography highlights

• Her family immigrated from Ireland to Great Britain shortly after her birth. Her academic gifts established her as an intellectual of note. She toured Europe in service to the British Treasury Department and a shuttered United Nations branch once dedicated to relief work.

• Murdoch met John Bayley at Oxford, and they married in 1956. She defied convention and chose not to have children. Her visible career, use of her maiden name and publicized open marriage made Murdoch a symbol of progressive womanhood for contemporary feminists.

• While at university, Murdoch came into brief but influential contact with prominent thinkers like Jean Paul-Sartre and Wittgenstein. Later, she was romantically linked to the Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti.

• She received the Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, The Sea (1978). That and several of her other novels were adapted to film.

• Murdoch became afflicted with Alzheimer’s. She slipped into relative reclusiveness but continued to write. She died in Oxford, England, in 1999.

A life of learning and letters

Early academic prowess set the stage for Murdoch’s impressive career. She attended boarding school in Bristol, then studied the classics and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and Newnham College, Cambridge.

She turned down the chance to study at Vassar College in upstate New York out of allegiance to the Communist Party of Great Britain. In The Paris Review interview referenced above, she described how her ambitions were derailed by World War II:

“When I finished my undergraduate career I was immediately conscripted because everyone was. Under ordinary circumstances, I would very much have wanted to stay on at Oxford, study for a Ph.D., and try to become a don. I was very anxious to go on learning.

But one had to sacrifice one’s wishes to the war. I went into the civil service, into the Treasury where I spent a couple of years. Then after the war I went into UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association, and worked with refugees in different parts of Europe.”

Murdoch met John Bayley at Oxford. The two married in 1956. She defied convention by remaining childless. Her successful career, use of her maiden name, and publicized open marriage made Murdoch an unwitting symbol of progressive womanhood for second wave feminism.

While at university, Murdoch came into brief but influential contact with prominent thinkers like Jean Paul-Sartre and Wittgenstein. Later, she was romantically linked to the Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti.

She later lectured in philosophy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Murdoch’s brief dedication to Communism complicated her visits to the U.S. even after she left the party.

Photo: Steve Brodie . . . . . . . . . .

Themes and literary import of Murdoch’s works

Murdoch bloomed as a novelist in her mid-thirties. After she published several nonfiction works, including the first scholarly text written in English on Jean-Paul Sartre  (Romantic Rationalist, 1953), she wrote Under the Net (1954). This first novel set Murdoch on the path to writing twenty-five more.

Murdoch’s acclaim for fiction eclipsed appreciation of her philosophical work. However, her novels’ precise psychological character studies and fixation on moral responses in cerebral plot lines alluded to her philosophical training.

In an appreciation of Iris Murdoch in the New York Times’ Enthusiast column, Susan Scarf Merill suggests where to start as a newcomer to her works:

 “ The Severed Head [Murdoch’s fifth novel] is an excellent place to start. Married man with mistress discovers wife is leaving him for their psychoanalyst.

Everyone is so concerned for everyone else — husband and wife help each other move, the analyst’s sister (also his lover, it turns out) sticks her nose in everywhere, and by the end, each character has a new partner and it seems that the world has reshuffled into better order, at least for the moment. Madcap as it sounds, it’s calm on the page. Murdoch’s prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty.”

Relationship with Brigid Brophy

The relationship between Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy began in 1954. They met at the Cheltenham Festival prize awards, at which Murdoch came second to Brophy. The two writers quickly became close. From this site’s biography of Brigid Brophy :

Murdoch’s biographer Peter Conradi wrote that “the friendship grew when the Leveys visited the Bayleys [Murdoch and her husband John Bayley ] at Steeple Aston, and Murdoch saw both in London; for years Brophy and Murdoch would go away for a weekend break. Neither husband felt excluded…”

Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, was also aware of her extramarital affairs, although she kept the details secret. During the years of their relationship, Murdoch wrote a thousand or more letters to Brophy, some of which are collected in the book  Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 .

Awards and Honors

Murdoch is one of the most decorated British novelists of all time. Some of her honors include The Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea (1978), the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973).

She received the Booker Prize for her novel The Sea, The Sea (1978).

Several of her novels were adapted to film. Her novels The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962) and The Sea, The Sea were adapted to television series or films.

She received honorary membership to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1987, she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire.

Final years and Alzheimer’s

Murdoch became afflicted with Alzheimer’s. She slipped into relative reclusiveness but continued to write. Her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was appreciated for how its simple language and lack of hard editing deterred from Murdoch’s signature style, but demonstrated the effects of Alzheimer’s on creativity.

John Bayley documented Murdoch’s later life struggles in his 1999 memoir Elegy for Iris . Her New York Times obituary reported that Bayley was at his wife’s bedside when she died at the age of 79 in Oxford, England, in February 1999.

. . . . . . . . . .

Iris (2001 film) and cultural resurgence

Actress Kate Winslet portrayed a young Murdoch to Dame Judi Dench’s older Murdoch in the 2001 biopic Iris . The film focused on Murdoch’s youthful intellectual prowess and complicated marriage.

Jim Broadbent, who played John Bayley, received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. Dench won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for hers. The film introduced Murdoch to a new generation of literary enthusiasts and fans.

In 2019, The Guardian ran a retrospective marking the reissue of all twenty-six of her novels in what would have been the year Murdoch turned 100. The article called her invented people “shapeshifters,” and praised her abilities to confront “the terrifying truth that human beings, in the absence of God, are off the leash.”

More about Iris Murdoch

On this site

• Women’s Spiritual Journeys Inspired by the Sea
• 5 Life-Changing Philosophical Books by Women Writers

Major Works

The source for this bibliography is Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, U.K.:

• Under the Net   (1954)
• The Flight from the Enchanter  (1956)
• The Sandcastle   (1957; short stories)
• Something Special   (1957)
• The Bell  (1958)
• A Severed Head   (1961)
• An Unofficial Rose   (1962)
• The Unicorn   (1963)
• The Italian Girl   (1964)
• The Red and the Green  (1965)
• The Time of the Angels  (1966)
• The Nice and the Good   (1968)
• Bruno’s Dream   (1969)
• A Fairly Honourable Defeat   (1970)
• An Accidental Man   (1971)
• The Black Prince   (1973)
• The Sacred and Profane Love Machine   (1974)
• A Word Child   (1975)
• Henry and Cato   1976)
• The Sea, the Sea   (1978)
• Nuns and Soldiers   (1980)
• The Philosopher’s Pupil   (1983)
• The Good Apprentice  (1985)
• The Book and the Brotherhood  (1987)
• The Message to the Planet  (1989)
• The Green Knight  (1993)
• Jackson’s Dilemma  (1995)
• Sartre: Romantic Rationalist   (1953)
• The Sovereignty of Good   (1970)
• The Fire and the Sun   (1977)
• Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals   (1992)
• Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature   (1997)
• A Severed Head   (with J.B. Priestley, 1964)
• The Italian Girl   (with James Saunders, 1969)
• The Three Arrows; The Servants and the Snow  (1972)
• The Servants  (1980)
• Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues  (1986)
• The Black Prince  (1987)
• A Year of Birds   (1978; revised edition, 1984)
• Poems by Iris Murdoch   (1997)

Biographies and memoir

• Elegy for Iris by John Bayley (1998)
• I ris Murdoch: A Life by Peter J. Conradi (2002)
• Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson (2003)
• Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch by John Bayley (2012)
• Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration by Miles Leeson (2017)

More information and sources

• Reader discussion of Iris Murdoch’s works on Goodreads
• 1990 interview in The Paris Review
• Iris Murdoch at 100 in The Guardian
• Iris Murdoch archive at the National Archive, UK
• The Secrets of Iris Murdoch’s and John Bayley’s Unconventional Marriage

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Iris Murdoch

• Born July 15 , 1919 · Dublin, Ireland
• Died February 8 , 1999 · Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK (Alzheimer's disease)
• Birth name Jean Iris Murdoch
• Iris Murdoch was born on July 15, 1919 in Dublin, Ireland. She was a writer and actress, known for The Italian Girl , A Severed Head (1971) and Television Theater (1953) . She was married to John Bayley . She died on February 8, 1999 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK.
• Spouse John Bayley (August 14, 1956 - February 8, 1999) (her death)
• She was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1976 Queen's New Year Honours List and the DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1987 Queen's New Year Honours List for her services to literature.
• Judi Dench and Kate Winslet portrayed her in the 2001 film Iris (2001) .
• Being a woman is like being Irish: Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
• On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
• On marriage: A married couple is a dangerous machine!
• On love: Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
• On growth: There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

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The atheist author Jesuits loved: Iris Murdoch

She was banned from studying in the United States as a young woman because she had been a communist in college. She was Irish-born but rarely returned home and once described herself as “unsentimental about Ireland.” She married an Oxford professor but had romantic affairs with both men and women throughout their marriage. Her novels treated subjects considered beyond the pale by many reviewers—and certainly so for America ’s literary sensibilities in the 1950s and 1960s. An atheist, she described religion as “no longer sustainable” in the modern age.

An unlikely candidate for praise from America reviewers—but not if you’re Iris Murdoch.

James K. A. Smith: “At the heart of Iris Murdoch’s moral vision is what she calls 'unselfing,' something surely worth revisiting in the age of the selfie.”

Our scribes and editors couldn’t get enough, and the philosopher-turned-novelist’s books received many a sparkling review in the magazine’s pages, starting with 1957’s The Sandcastle . Numerous positive mentions followed throughout the next three decades; her 1968 novel The Nice and the Good was reviewed by William B. Hill, S.J., who wrote that the book, “though filled with incident, including murder and perilous adventure, still manages to be profound—perhaps Miss Murdoch’s best to date.” Father Hill reviewed 1972’s An Accidental Man as well, praising Murdoch for “characters in sprawling abundance, most of them perfectly limned.”

In a 1973 review of Murdoch’s The Black Prince , James R. Lindroth noted Murdoch’s “enduring concern” about solipsism and narcissism as dominant themes in modern life; “unlike many of her contemporaries who do no more than confirm man’s despair, she reaffirms love as a force capable of shattering the shell of self.” The Black Prince , Lindroth wrote, “marks a further step in the artistic development of one of England’s most impressive authors.”

In a long 1974 roundup of “The Year’s Best in Paperbacks,” Paul C. Doherty praised Murdoch’s “fine new novel,” A Fairly Honorable Defeat , “in which the only character who can consistently respond to the events of the story with charity, intelligence and dignity is the homosexual hero, Axel, and yet Axel must hide his true feelings from all but his closest friends.” Doherty linked Murdoch’s latest effort to E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice , first written in 1913 but not published until 1971 because the title character was gay. (The year 1974 seems to have marked an expansion of America ’s purview in terms of book coverage; Thomas Pynchon made the same roundup).

A 1980 review in America by James Gaffney treated Murdoch’s nonfiction text The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Calling Murdoch “one of my favorite modern fiction writers as well as one of my favorite modern philosophers,” Gaffney gave the book high praise, writing that it “sums up vast traces of Platonic thought so well that it could serve as either an introduction to Plato or a source of new insight.” In 1983, Samuel Coale praised Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil as a “fat, dazzling novel” that “demonstrates Murdoch’s penchant for allegory.”

Murdoch's 1953 book Sartre: Romantic Rationalist  introduced many English-language readers to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time.

Those three decades of approbation weren’t the end of America ’s fascination with Murdoch’s life and works, and just four years ago, James K. A. Smith penned a long essay, “ The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch ,” after the publication of a Gary Browning’s Why Iris Murdoch Matters , in which he wrote:

At the heart of Murdoch’s moral vision is what she calls “unselfing,” something surely worth revisiting in the age of the selfie. As one might guess, this amounts to finding a way out of the claustrophobia of our self-regard by answering a call from outside.

Murdoch was born in 1919 in Dublin to a Protestant family, but her family moved to London when she was an infant. After studying Classics and philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge, she taught philosophy for many years at Oxford. In 1956, she married John Bayley, an Oxford English professor and novelist, though their long-lasting union was recognized by both partners as an open marriage. (The 2001 film “Iris,” starring Kate Winslet and Dame Judi Dench as Murdoch, was based on Bayley’s memoirs about their marriage and Murdoch’s eventual death in 1999 from Alzheimer’s disease.)

Though Murdoch is remembered most often on this side of the pond as a fiction writer, her 26 novels (and several plays) were all published only after Sartre: Romantic Rationalist , her 1953 book that introduced many English-language readers to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time—and Sartre’s themes of alienation and solipsism in modern life certainly found their way into many of her works of fiction. As a philosopher, Murdoch is noted for her work on the cultivation of virtue and the search for meaning in modern life.

Murdoch, noted Smith in his essay , objected to the separation of ethics from personal development. “Ethics left in the hands of philosophers became one more epistemic puzzle. The problem of the moral life was construed as either ignorance or paralysis in the face of moral dilemmas. But Murdoch knew this was all a smokescreen,” wrote Smith. “The source of our moral problems is not that we do not know enough; the problem is us. ‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,’ she wryly remarked.”

Murdoch became more of a novelist than a philosopher as the years went by, though the two vocations always seemed linked. She was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea , and was made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987. That same year, she won the Royal Society Literary Award. Her novels were often sprawling affairs, full of multiple characters and plot twists, but a common theme was love in all its forms—and all its possible modern permutations.

“For Murdoch, love’s pageant was by turns chimerical, alchemical and miraculous,” wrote Gerald T. Cobb, S.J., in his 2002 America review of Iris Murdoch , a biography by Peter J. Conradi. “Her fiction implicitly argues that one must be something of a philosopher to be a true lover, and conversely that one must be something of a lover to be a profound philosopher.”

Much of that fiction—about alienated people searching for love in all the right and wrong places—remains pertinent today. “We in the United States might not have been ready for Murdoch in her lifetime,” Smith wrote. “She wrote in and for a post-Christian world that has only more recently become our shared experience. She wrote for a world that is now our milieu.”

“Her fiction implicitly argues that one must be something of a philosopher to be a true lover, and conversely that one must be something of a lover to be a profound philosopher.”

Our poetry selection for this week is “ Little Brother ,” by Jennifer M. Phillips. Readers can view all of America ’s published poems here .

Also, this summer the Catholic Book Club is reading and discussing Mary Doria Russell’s novel, The Sparrow . Click here for more information or to sign up for our Facebook discussion group .

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media . We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other Catholic Book Club columns:

• The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
• What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
• Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
• The mystery of Thomas Merton’s death—and the witness of America magazine’s poetry edito r
• Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (to date)

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How Irish was Iris? The life and times of the first Irish-born Booker Prize-winner

Iris murdoch: ‘being a woman is like being irish’, one of her characters said.

Iris Murdoch at the conferring of honorary degrees by Dublin University in 1985. Photograph: Jack McManus / THE IRISH TIMES

The first Irish-born writer to win the Booker Prize was Iris Murdoch, the centenary of whose birth occurs on July 15th, but how Irish she was or considered herself to be has been the subject of some debate.

The only child of a middle-class Protestant couple, she was born in Phibsborough on Dublin’s north side. Her father, John Hughes Murdoch, a civil servant, was of a Co Down Presbyterian background and her mother, Irene Richardson, a trained singer, came from a Dublin Church of Ireland family. There is some dispute about whether the family moved to London when she was one or nine.

After boarding school in Bristol, she attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied “Greats”, a combination of classics, ancient history and philosophy, emerging with a first-class honours degree. She was a member of the Communist Party at Oxford and although she left after about four years, whenever she wished to visit the US, she had to get special permission, even at the height of her success as a writer, something that greatly irked her.

Portrait of Iris Murdoch in London, 1966. Photograph: Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

After graduating, she spent two years at the Treasury before joining the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association, where she worked for three years with displaced people in camps in Austria.

The Irish Times view on human rights in Ireland: a work in progress

The Irish Times view on Istanbul’s election: a historic rebuke for Erdogan

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Fintan O'Toole: There is a gulf between Ireland and England when it comes to Europe

In 1947, she was awarded a studentship in philosophy at Cambridge and the following year got a fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963.

Although she became a philosopher, she had seriously considered becoming an art historian and had studied Renaissance painting deeply, so it wasn’t unusual that after Oxford she taught general studies at the Royal College of Art.

Inner lives

But it is as a novelist that she is best known – and what a prolific one she became, writing no fewer than 27 novels over 40 years (as well as plays, poetry and philosophical works). Her fiction is informed very much by her philosophical outlook, and truth, good and evil, sexual relationships, crises of faith and the power of the unconscious are among her major themes. However, the intense inner lives of the characters are in no way diminished by the philosophical issues considered.

It is hardly surprising that the range was wide and diverse in so many novels. The Black Prince (1973) is very different from the much earlier comic novel, Under the Net (1954); it is closely based on Hamlet and won Murdoch the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for its complex narrative structure. The Unicorn (1963) is very different again from either of those novels; the Gothic influence on it is obvious and it could be read as either a paean to the genre or as sending it up. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which won the 1974 Whitbread Novel Award, is one of four Murdoch novels with male adultery as a major theme; the leading of double lives and the significance and influence of dreams are closely examined.

Passionately Irish

The Sea, The Sea won the 1978 Booker Prize. One of her finest novels, it considers the power of love and loss. In this paper, Julie Parsons wrote that the central character, whose powers are waning with age, is a thinly disguised portrait of Murdoch herself.

“Being a woman is like being Irish; everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time,” says a character in The Red and the Green (1965). Set in Ireland during the Rising and War of Independence, it treated characters on both sides sympathetically but AN Wilson (Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her) recorded that she came to regret her sympathetic portrayal of Irish nationalism. Writing to a close friend in 1978, she said she felt “unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred”.

Nevertheless, her friend and biographer Peter Conradi argued that her Irishness was important to her and another friend, Paul Levy, wrote in the Independent last year that she “always felt passionately Irish but she also felt that it was possible at the same time to be British”.

In 1956, she married John Bayley; he was a literary critic, novelist and Warton Professor of English at Oxford. The marriage lasted until her death in 1999 but seemed an unusual relationship. It has been suggested that she had numerous affairs with both men and women and that he had little interest in sex. AN Wilson remarked that Murdoch “had clearly been one of those delightful young women . . . who was prepared to go to bed with almost anyone”.

They had no children. When she was struck down with senile dementia, Bayley nursed her tenderly during the final four years of her life and published a loving memoir called Elegy for Iris, which was made into a biopic, Iris, in 2001.

Martyn Turner

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Dame Iris Murdoch

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Dame Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 to Anglo-lrish parents. She went to school in London and Bristol, before studying at Somerville College, Oxford, where she and later at Cambridge, as a student in Philosophy. On leaving University in 1942, she worked in for the British Government in the Treasury Department, and with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. After the war she went to Belgium and Austria, where she worked in a Displaced Persons Camp. In 1948 she was made a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she lectured in Philosophy. In 1956 she married the critic and Oxford Professor of English, John Bayley. She was awarded a CBE in 1976 and a DBE in 1967. Her novels have been translated into 26 languages. Widely regarded by many critics as one of the most important post-war novelists, her fiction include Under the Net (1953), The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), Bruno's Dream (1969), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, The Sea, The Sea (1978), winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction, The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Green Knight (1993). Her books on philosophy include The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Her plays include 'The Servants and the Snow', adapted into a libretto for an opera by William Matthias in 1980, 'Art and Eros' and 'The Black Prince', both been produced at the National Theatre in London. Her portrait by Tom Phillips was placed in the National Portrait Gallery in 1987. Dame Iris Murdoch died in 1999.

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Oxford University Press, 2011

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Laura albritton, more online by laura albritton.

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• Autumn Light

Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters & Diaries, 1939-1945

Edited by peter j. conradi, reviewed by laura albritton.

A Writer at War collects correspondence and diary entries by Irish-born author and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch, perhaps the most criminally under-read writer in America at this time. Why Murdoch should be under-read in the States is a mystery. Author of twenty-five novels plus significant works on philosophy, Murdoch wrote narratives of great psychological intensity that grapple with mythic forces: the search for meaning, morality, the loss of faith, and manifestations of love. Often featuring charismatic male protagonists, many of her books, including Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea , are fearless tours de force. In the U.K., Murdoch has not been so neglected, witness the three biographies of her within the last decade, but the fascination with her personal affairs has at times threatened to overshadow her literary achievements.

If Iris Murdoch exists in the American popular consciousness, it is largely due to her widower John Bayley’s three successful memoirs written after her death, and the subsequent film based on them. Iris , starring Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, portrayed a young Murdoch having affairs and an elderly Murdoch losing her faculties to Alzheimer’s. As A. N. Wilson, author of the controversial Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her , observed, “All that was left of Iris was a young woman cycling around Oxford and a very old woman going demented.” Rival biographer and editor Peter Conradi would agree: “It was as if a film about Nietzsche told us that he lost his wits from tertiary syphilis, had a big moustache, was rude to Wagner, and was looked after by his sister, but never that he wrote The Birth of Tragedy .” In other words, what had been omitted was the tremendous intellect, the brilliant novelist, the magnetic personality. A Writer at War is part of Conradi’s campaign to rectify this state of affairs.

Conradi has crafted helpful, well-written introductions to each of the book’s three parts. Part one, Murdoch’s diary entries, begins in 1939 as war is imminent. She and fellow students at Oxford have embarked on a tour through English towns and villages as “The Magpie Players,” a troupe featuring ballads, songs, and dramatic pieces. The proceeds of their performances will benefit various relief groups, including one for Jewish refugees from Germany. Although Murdoch is only twenty, already her prose is winning and fluid, introspective one moment and judgmental the next: “I have revised my ideas of Cecil [Quentin],” she notes. “Strange how quickly one can change estimations of character. He is not the lofty conceited & utterly snobbish young swine I thought he was at all. He is very keen on the drama, & he is humble enough to want to be liked.” They caravan from place to place, half-starving at times and later feasting in manor houses; Murdoch mentions the looming war only peripherally. Conradi points out that this experience later led her to include theaters and actors in her novels Under the Net , The Green Knight , and The Sea, The Sea . The diary entries are surprisingly absorbing, with a strong narrative (probably due in part to Murdoch’s having edited them in 1988). War becomes a reality only in the final pages when she is about to travel to London and her friend Hugh scolds her, “Do you realize there’s a pretty good chance of London being bombed to-night? Don’t be a little fool!”

In part two, Murdoch’s correspondent is Frank Thompson, who read classics at New College, Oxford, and came from a “well-connected Bohemian family.” (His younger brother was E. P. Thomas, the famous historian.) After being posted to the Middle East, Thompson eventually served as a liaison officer for anti-fascist Bulgarian partisans and was tragically captured and executed in 1944. He is still remembered as a hero in Bulgaria. Conradi writes, “It may not be an over-simplification to say that Iris Murdoch loved Frank because he was nicer than she was and David [Hicks, her next correspondent] because he was nastier.” Included are many of Thompson’s replies to Murdoch; it is impossible not to like this thoughtful, original young poet.

In writing to Frank Thompson, Murdoch shows off at times (still only in her early twenties) but on the whole her formidable intellectual and emotional defenses seem to fall away. Her writing is often warm, open, and direct. She confides, “I have just so damn many very tiring and quite unavoidable activities that I have just no time to live my own life—at a time when my own life feels of intense value & interest to me. Jesus God how I want to write. I want to write a long long & exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself & observe in the characters of others.” Later in the same letter she confesses, “I should tell you that I have parted company with my virginity,” and hopes that he isn’t angry with her. Conradi convincingly suggests that Murdoch’s sympathetic portrayal of military men in certain novels is owed to her affection for Thompson. Whether or not they might have found happiness together had he lived cannot be known, but he had a lasting effect on her life and art. Thompson did warn her against falling for “emotional fascists.” In part three in her letters to David Hicks, we become aware that Murdoch has failed to heed Thompson’s advice.

The war itself is most emphasized in part three. Murdoch does war work for the Treasury and then for the UN agency for displaced persons. Her ambition solidifies, as she writes a series of failed novels and falls in love with new writers including Sartre and de Beauvoir. If Murdoch’s correspondence to Thompson is warm and open, her letters to David Hicks, who worked for the British Council, start off as virtuosic, talky performances and end as obsessive entreaties.

We never read Hicks’s replies, but a portrait nevertheless emerges: “Your vanity is so outrageous that it is positively sublime and almost charming.” And later, “I was amused by your letter too. It had that tinge of churlishness which I always associate with you.” The more churlish Hicks is, apparently, the more Murdoch ties herself in knots to perform on the page for him. While it is fascinating to see her ideas on Henry James and Proust coalesce, it is uncomfortable to observe this confident young writer becoming increasingly anxious for his approval. When they finally meet again in person in 1945, for two weeks, they become engaged. Murdoch writes him, “After the years of my own timidity & partly living—after the people sober & withdrawn from life—after the various visions of marriage as equals security & Settling Down and a large income and a house in Bucks & no more madness—you are the great wide sea & peril & a high wind.” Murdoch was romanticizing the emotional peril, but it was there. Finally, when we learn Hicks has broken it off, we can’t help but feel relieved. Yet Hicks (and his successor Elias Canetti) represented a type that became quite important, as did the specter of obsessive love, in novels such as The Severed Head and The Sea, The Sea .

The diary and letters demonstrate how deeply Murdoch mined her own life for the dilemmas, milieu, and emotion that emerge in her novels. The title Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War , is either slightly misleading—in that much of the volume does not concern World War II, but rather, her own coming into being as a writer—or metaphorical. Regardless, Conradi has done an excellent job of editing and introducing these pages; what one ultimately takes away from them is a portrait of a complex young woman in the process of becoming a formidable artist.

Published on March 18, 2013

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The best iris murdoch books, recommended by miles leeson.

Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration by Miles Leeson

Iris Murdoch gained fame as a novelist, a philosopher and, perhaps most prominently of all, for her public and rapid decline (and posthumous immortalization by her husband John Bayley) after an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. But now, more than a century on from her birth, the attention is returning back to her work. Miles Leeson , Director of the Iris Murdoch Centre at the University of Chichester, recommends what books to read from her canon of 27 novels.

Interview by Stephanie Kelley

The Bell by Iris Murdoch

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

A Word Child by Iris Murdoch

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch

The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch

1 The Bell by Iris Murdoch

2 the black prince by iris murdoch, 3 a word child by iris murdoch, 4 existentialists and mystics: writings on philosophy and literature by iris murdoch, 5 the philosopher's pupil by iris murdoch.

C ould you tell me a bit about who Iris Murdoch was—about her life as well as defining characteristics of her books?

She was born in Dublin in 1919, and then moved to London when she was just a year old. She returned to Ireland frequently for holidays, but she never spent much time there or lived there. She grew up in London and went to school there, and then later Badminton School in Bristol. From there, she won a scholarship to study at Somerville College, Oxford, where she received a first class degree in Mods and Greats, which is ancient history , Latin and Greek.

After that, due to the war, she  went to work in London in the Treasury, and then subsequently worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in Belgium and then in Austria. She came back, having worked with refugees, and having met Sartre and various other people. She had a year’s studentship at Cambridge, where she met Wittgenstein before he moved to Ireland , and he had a great influence on her later thought. From then, she then got a position at St. Anne’s college in Oxford, where she taught until the early 1960s—she taught philosophy .

She taught philosophy for several more years before giving up teaching entirely towards the end of the 1960s, though she continued to write philosophy for the rest of her life. She started her novel writing with the publication of Under the Net in 1954. Then, between 1954 and 1995, there were 26 novels, each of them focused around a particular group or set of people, but all concerned with the ideas of freedom, goodness, and love. Her philosophy is very much concerned with the same elements as well.

Can you tell me a bit about the decline of her life towards the end? Her husband John Bayley wrote several books about her that became very famous.

One thing that most people know about her, even if you’ve never read her work, is that she suffered and ultimately died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1999. It was diagnosed a few years prior to that, and was announced in 1996 actually. At the end of her life, she went rapidly downhill. But there’s evidence to suggest that actually, she was suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s well before that, even in the mid-1980s onwards.

“Iris Murdoch was one of the greatest novelists of the late twentieth century”

Her reputation suffered in some regards due to the three biographies of her that John Bayley wrote in the late nineties. One was published after her life, called Widower’s House (1999). The first two of his biographical works, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) and Elegy for Iris: A Memoir (1999), were the basis for the Oscar-winning film directed by Richard Eyre Iris (2001), which was very well-received, starring Judi Dench, Kate Winslet,Jim Broadbent (who won the Oscar) and Hugh Bonneville. There was also the major, official biography by Peter J. Conradi which came out in 2001; there was another biography called Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her by her friend A N Wilson in 2003. And the life writing, which the first ten years following her death really did color her image, and I suppose in some regards she really became the poster girl for Alzheimer’s.

Because of this, I think her fiction and philosophy suffers. But, after the death of an author, their reputation does suffer a bit. It’s only really now in the last five or ten years or so that her philosophy has come back into prominence, and really only the last few years that her fiction is being taken more seriously as well.

Before we discuss your book choices, I noticed that you didn’t choose The Sea, The Sea , which made me want to ask about your logic or rationale of deciding on these selections.

Unlike some novelists who don’t have an enormous list to choose from, Murdoch’s got a very wide canon of literature. I would say these choices are in some sense personal to me, but also represent a good selection and range from the work.

For me, The Sea, The Sea stands out for people because it won the Booker . If you go into a bookshop, quite often The Sea, The Sea will be one of the few (or perhaps the only) Murdoch novel that’s in stock. People know that that’s one to go for. But I don’t think it’s a particularly good entry novel into Murdoch’s work. Certainly when I’m teaching Murdoch’s fiction or when people ask me about it, I tell them that you probably ought to have read several of Murdoch’s works before you try and read The Sea, The Sea.

Is that length? Is that a degree of complicatedness?

I think so. I think you’ve got to be in tune with how Murdoch writes to enjoy The Sea, The Sea ; you’ve got to enjoy her self-obsessed male narrator type. And there are plenty of those— The Black Prince and A Word Child have very self-obsessed, self-absorbed male narrators, much as The Sea, The Sea does. Charles in The Sea, The Sea is very much a man who says he’s given up or retired from the theatre to write his memoirs, but what happens in the book is that everybody from his life starts to come and join him, even if he doesn’t want them there—the past loves of his life who he hasn’t treated very well. He then rediscovers his first love, who is coincidentally living in the same village as where he’s staying.

Let’s turn to the first book on your list, which is The Bell (1958). I think this is her fourth novel, if I’m not mistaken—tell us a bit about it and why you chose it.

The Bell is recognized as her first major landmark. I think you can look at the first six or seven novels of her career, from Under the Net up to maybe An Unofficial Rose , where she’s playing with form and genre—just experimenting, really. Trying to find out what form of novel suits her temperament and her writing style. I think beyond Unofficial Rose , she’s very much found her niche and her style.

And what are the characteristics of that style, as it develops?

The characteristics of that style is that she writes primarily two types of novels. She writes closed novels, which focus on a small community or a household or a particular location. The Bell and The Black Prince would certainly be two closed novels, while A Word Child and Philosopher’s Pupil would be two open novels. An open novel would have a much wider range of characters; in the line of Dickens or perhaps Dostoyevsky , it features large numbers of characters dealing with major themes I outlined earlier such as what it means to be free, the fallings in and out of love that Murdoch’s novels are so well renowned for, difficulties with families or with the perception of each other as individuals, grief. Those would be some of her major themes for her fiction.

She claimed that The Bell was her lucky novel. There were three novels prior to that. The first two, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), were very much dealing with issues that came out of her interest and then later difficulties with the post-Second World War existentialist movement and her own life living in London during the Second World War . So they’re very much influenced by continental writers like Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Samuel Beckett . The Sandcastle (1957), her third novel, has been thought of as middlebrow female writing. It was seen as kind of a genre romance work, although that view has changed now.

“It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel”

The Bell was very well received. In the first year it sold over 30,000 copies, which was far more than any of her novels had ever sold before. It’s very well developed around a small community within Imber court and it focuses on the experiences of Dora Greenfield, a young woman of 21, who’s married a completely unsuitable man called Paul . Paul has gone off to this quasi-religious community which is attached to the religious community of the abbey, to undertake historical work relating to documentation. And he invites Dora, who is at that point in London, down to be with him. It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel, which takes a lot from Austen: “Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.”

We might move on then to your second book choice, The Black Prince , which Murdoch writes more than a decade on. Tell us about why you chose this one.

It’s the most complex and complicated of Murdoch’s novels. It plays around with form; it’s a quasi-postmodern novel. It’s got a range of voices. It’s the story of an eccentric failed artist/ author called Bradley Pearson, who’s trying to write a great work of artistry. His great friend and rival is Arnold Baffin, a popular author who writes works that sell. And Bradley is intensely jealous of this. The relationship between Bradley and Arnold fuels the novel.

It’s Murdoch’s reflection on the question of what great art is, and what it means to be obsessed with other people. Bradley is obsessed with Arnold, and later on he’s obsessed with Arnold’s daughter, Julian, who perceives Bradley as this very strange man. She calls him a ‘funny uncle’ who she’s known all her life, and yet the two of them fall in love and have this great—though quite short-lived—relationship that’s intensely erotic and sexual, especially for Bradley, who hasn’t experienced this for a long time. There’s a wonderful scene in Covent Garden where he can’t stand even his own emotions and he’s sick in the flower market. There are moments of great humor in Murdoch’s novels and that’s one of them.

“ The Black Prince  is Murdoch’s reflection on the question of what great art is”

What else would I say about The Black Prince ? Very like The Sea, The Sea , people from his past come back to haunt Bradley—friends, his ex-wife, his sister—and he fails to pay attention to them. This is one of the great themes of Murdoch’s novels: that we have to perceive people, and see them as they really are, and not as want them to be. It’s the same as in Word Child with Hilary Burde: Bradley just doesn’t perceive other people as they are. There are scenes of him discussing his love, or how he looks at his ex-wife, or Arnold’s wife, Rachel—with both of whom he has had relationships—where you see this. He’s quite a damaged character himself, but he’s also quite damaging to women. There’s what some people perceive as a rape scene with Arnold’s daughter Julian, while she’s dressed as a boy, so gender fluidity comes into it.

Your third choice, published two years later, is A Word Child . You briefly mentioned it a moment ago—why did you choose this one?

I chose it because it balances well with The Black Prince , and is very close in date with it. It comes from her most renowned period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when she was producing almost a novel a year. All of them were very well received and very well reviewed. A Word Child is not unlike The Black Prince in the sense that it’s based around this one rather odd man called Hilary Burde, a repressed creature who we find out has had a difficult childhood, but has a brilliant mind. Through the support of a teacher, he manages to get to Oxford, and he could have gone on to be an academic superstar. But he has problems because he’s fallen in love with the wife of a friend, Gunnar Jopling, and the wife has fallen in love with Hilary, too. He shouldn’t have done this, quite clearly. There’s this awful moment when Hilary drives her away from Oxford and there’s a car crash and she dies. And she’s carrying Gunnar Jopling’s child as well.

That’s the background to where we begin. Hilary is 41; he’s a very minor civil servant in London, living in a shared flat and keeping himself to himself. He’s also responsible for his sister, Crystal. The relationships between siblings and twins come up in a lot of Murdoch’s novels. They’re very important in The Black Prince and in The Bell. And they are in this novel, too. Crystal sees things. She’s not classically intelligent, but she’s able to perceive reality as it really is, while Hilary isn’t. Later on, Gunnar comes back into his life and explains his love for his new wife and, in a tragicomic way, history repeats itself. Hilary falls in love with the second wife, and the second wife falls in love with him. There’s quite an uncomfortable scene between the second wife, Kitty, and their servant, Biscuit (not her real name). The back and forth between the two of them is quite racist and derogatory.

There are questions in the novel revolving around obsession. Hilary is in some sense this enchanter figure. If Murdoch believes there are some who perceive reality as it really is, Crystal is one. Christopher is another; he’s a saint-like figure. There are people that are patient and people that are violent and wish to take possession of people—that’s what A Word Child is all about.

Iris Murdoch seems in many ways to be a late-twentieth-century mainstream British novelist, but so many of her preoccupations, with love and relationships and the connection between morality and the aesthetic and philosophy and theology, a quite deep and abiding and philosophically complex.

This is a good point talk about her philosophical writings and her literary criticism, collected in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature . It’s important to mention she’s a tutor at Oxford throughout a good early portion of her career.

She taught in Oxford from the late 1940s to 1961. So about 12 or 13 years. She’s a tutor in philosophy and she’s teaching the greats of moral philosophical thought . She teaches Plato and Aristotle , right through to Kant and Nietzsche and beyond—she did come up to the modern era, but she was very happy teaching Hume and Hegel. She had a very wide range of interests in what she taught, but she always went back to Platonism. Platonism was her great love and it underpins a lot of the novels, certainly the ones we’ve been talking about today. This idea of the transcendence towards the good and how we manage to achieve that it in our frail and limited human form, how we move slowly towards potentials of goodness and how some people aren’t able to because of self-obsession, ego—those kinds of issues.

Do you have any favorite essays in Existentialists and Mystics that you want to draw the reader’s attention to?

It’s a wonderful collection published in 1997 by Murdoch’s biographer, Peter Conradi. He told me it was his crowning achievement, more so that the biography, which I thought was surprising. If readers are coming fresh to her non-fiction, I would say you’ve got to read ‘Against Dryness’ from the 1950s. It’s the best discussion of literary fiction and where we are. Even 70 years on, it’s very much still relevant, addressing contemporary themes such as, ‘Where is the novel now? How do we combat our own insularity and moral life? What does the novel do?’ And she argues that it needs to break out of the forms that it finds itself in and move back to discussing life—the outer lives of characters, but their inner thoughts as well. As I mentioned earlier, in this, Murdoch goes back to major nineteenth-century novelists.

“Murdoch ought to be seen as the heir to the nineteenth-century realist novels of George Eliot, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, even going back to Austen”

That’s really interesting. Last we have The Philosopher’s Pupil , which was published in 1983. Tell us a bit about this one and why you chose it.

Murdoch’s novels can be divided into three periods. You’ve got the early developmental and experimental stage. Then you’ve got the major period that concludes with The Black Prince. Then you have the later novels. These are often called the ‘baggy monsters’ (a quote taken from Henry James about his large, quasi-allegorical novels.) Later in her life, from Nuns and Soldiers onwards, really, the novels get longer and longer as she tries to expand the range of characters. Sometimes we get 20 or 30 characters in a novel. The novels are quite Dickensian and influenced by Dostoyevsky. She keeps the same ideas and concerns and concepts that I mentioned earlier, but she’s trying to pack in much more of life. There are elements of the historical novel on occasion.

The Philosopher’s Pupil is my favorite of the late novels. There’s an enormous web of characters and an interconnected society. This is one of the few novels that creates a completely realized setting outside of London. It’s set in one town that Murdoch develops. It’s a spa town, but it has only a passing resemblance to British spa towns like Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells. The major conflict is that the philosopher is coming back to town. John Robert Rozanov is perceived by the town as a great sage. His arrival sparks off a lot of the action that occurs within the novel.

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Like Charles Arrowby, Rozanov has retired from philosophy and teaching. In the novel it says “all the books are inside him now”; he believes he understands everything. And yet he’s a tragically flawed character himself because he falls in love with and wants to seduce his own granddaughter. Ultimately, he palms her off on to somebody else. That’s quite an uncomfortable scene. And then there’s the pupil of the title, George McCaffrey, one of three brothers in the novel who are all antagonistic towards each other. The novel opens with George trying to kill his wife by crashing a car into a canal. The big Murdochian themes are all there. There’s a lot of water imagery; there’s a lot of being outside, looking in through windows. This idea of perception through rain is important in the novel. There’s an enormous cast of characters. There are animals; there’s a small dog that runs into the sea and you wonder whether he’s going to be rescued or not. Murdoch’s good on animals and water imagery. We haven’t talked that through today, but there’s plenty there.

It’s a book about aging, as well. All the characters are aging and trying to find their place in life. There’s a priest that loses his identity called Bernard Jacoby, there’s a Quaker, who’s the saint figure, the image of the piece, called William Eastcote, who’s important to the moral weight of the novel. You have different characters who embody different ideas and concerns, or philosophical ideas. Rozanov, the McCaffreys who are chasing after him, Eastcote who’s a Quaker and talks about demythologizing of religion, Bernard Jacoby, the priest who loses his religion and wants to move towards some kind of quasi-Buddhist idea, which was in Murdoch’s mind very much at that time. It’s a difficult novel to talk about because there’s so much going on. It’s very much a big novel of ideas. But it’s beautifully wrought as well. There’s lots of humour, mistaken identity. Those sorts of things.

This introduction to her novels has revealed them to be fascinating and full of compelling characters and grips and turns and interesting observations about life and love and philosophy. To close—and this might be unfair—to someone who hasn’t read Iris Murdoch, especially at this crucial point with her as the poster child for Alzheimer’s is being replaced by a more considered look back at her work, why read Iris Murdoch? And what do you think her legacy will look like in the future?

Why read her? Because, like all great novelists, she speaks to us today because she’s interested in universals. She’s interested in what makes us human. She’s interested in our flaws, our ego, our propensity at times of emotional crisis to do stupid things, to fall in love with the wrong person, or completely disregard the person who would be right for us. She talks about familial relations. She asks what it means to consider ourselves outside of ourselves. To think about whether there is such a thing as goodness. Where does goodness exist? Does God matter anymore? What about Judeo-Christian imagery? What does it mean to be good? Should we be good for nothing? Or is there some kind of redemption in life? How do we deal with guilt? A lot of the novels deal with guilt and what happens when we cause people a lot of pain. If they’ve died, how do we then forgive ourselves?

All those questions are not just relevant for when she was writing but impact on our lives today because, like the nineteenth-century novelists she wished to emulate, these questions come back again and again and again. As Murdoch is part of this literary lineage she’ll never not be relevant. And I think that her books, although they were out of fashion for a number of years, have recently been coming back into consideration. She’s now being considered in light of her particular take on feminism, she’s being thought of as an important female writer not just as somebody who deals with male narrators. In the past she’s been criticized for that, but since her centenary year in 2019 there has been a reassessment of what her legacy is and how her own life and her own biography is so tied up with her novels. Certainly now that we have biographies, her letters and publications of her poetry and journals to come in the next few years, I think interest in Iris Murdoch will just continue to grow.

Thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The only other thing I’d mention is that if I was going to recommend somewhere to start with Iris Murdoch, I’d recommend The Bell . It’s short, it’s contained, it’s got a great story. It’s highly enjoyable, it’s amusing and comic, but there are also plenty of what you might call stereotypical Murdochian images of ideas. If you enjoy The Bell , I think you’d go on and enjoy many more of her novels.

January 20, 2020

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Miles Leeson

Miles Leeson is the Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, The Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, the author of Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2010) and the editor of Incest in Contemporary Literature  (Manchester UP, 2018) . His most recent work is the edited collection Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration  (Sabrestorm Press, 2019).

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Iris Murdoch : A Life - The Authorized Biography Paperback – January 1, 2002

• Part of series Authorised Biography
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harpercollins Pb (January 1, 2002)
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Where to start with Iris Murdoch: a guide to her best novels

Iris Murdoch wrote 26 novels, seven of which were nominated for a Booker Prize – including one winner – but with so many books to choose from, where should you start? Here, we select some of her best works

Written by John Self

Reading Iris Murdoch is easy: you start by ignoring her reputation. At least this was my experience, having expected this high-minded philosopher-novelist’s books to be stodgy and remote, animated not by story or characters, but by ideas. This could not have been more wrong. Murdoch’s books are not worthy or dull in the least: dull is the opposite of what they are. 

Her novels are clever, yes, and ambitious, yet they are not the opposite of popular fiction, but an elevation of it. Characters love and hate, are guilty and duplicitous, have secret sex while trying to be good: and all in a flurry of activity as their creator whisks them around the book like chess pieces on a board. 

‘Literature is for fun, literature entertains,’ said Murdoch in 1977, and her books are funny, lively, as well as being ahead of their time in social issues, like her empathetic and subtle portrayal of homosexuality in The Bell (1958) or A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). John Updike likened her to Muriel Spark – both writers ‘reappropriate[d] for their generation Shakespeare’s legacy of dark comedy, of deceptions and enchantments’.  

She wrote 26 novels – ‘Iris Murdoch’s annual novel now seems to have become an established British institution,’ wrote one critic on publication of her eleventh – so where is the best place to begin? 

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch, first published in 1970, longlisted for the Lost Man Booker, 2010

If you read only one 

The Black Prince (1973) – this month’s Booker Prize Book of the Month – may well be Murdoch’s best novel, a sustained achievement which feels like a culmination of her talents. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but didn’t win, against a very strong shortlist – The Dressmaker , A Green Equinox , The Siege of Krishnapur – all characterised by a blend of black humour and eccentricity. 

This ‘celebration of love’ (as the subtitle has it) is as demented and twisted as any book Murdoch created. From the opening lines, where our narrator is told by his frenemy Arnold Baffin, ‘I think that I have just killed my wife,’ it doesn’t let up. The narrator is Bradley Pearson, a mediocre novelist who hates bestseller Baffin. He wants peace and space to write the book he is convinced will be his masterpiece – but life keeps rushing in. First, Baffin’s wife Rachel – who, after all, is not dead – falls in love with Bradley, though he is embarrassingly unable to consummate their relationship. Later Bradley does manage to achieve what he memorably calls ‘the anti-gravitational aspiration of the male organ’ – in a shoe shop, with Baffin’s daughter Julian.  

Bradley is ridiculous – we don’t like him, but we recognise in him the ludicrousness of our own worst impulses, and the dreamlike series of diversions and frustrations that stand in the way of his goal. This is a recurring theme for Murdoch: the chaos that sexual love brings, how it both revels in selfish behaviour and drives people out of themselves. For a serious novel, as writer Sophie Hannah put it, The Black Prince seems ‘too brilliant, too purely enjoyable’. 

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch wanted her fiction to teach us lessons: often the lesson being about freedom, and how doing what you want will affect those around you

If you’re looking for her funniest book 

Murdoch’s fifth novel, A Severed Head (1961), is where her distinctive style first reached maturity. It shows the distilled essence of her appetite for the ludicrous comedy of life. It is full of sparky dialogue: ‘We’re not getting anywhere,’ the narrator’s wife says to him. ‘One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage,’ he replies. ‘It’s not a public conveyance.’ And it is riddled with Murdoch’s characteristic sexual pairings: by the end almost every combination of characters has made a go of it. 

It opens with concealment, the narrator Martin Lynch-Gibbon discussing his wife Antonia with his mistress Georgie. ‘How is Antonia’s analysis going?’ ‘Fizzingly. She enjoys it disgracefully.’ Deceptions and revelations pile up as new characters arrive and fall in love, and by the time our adulterous narrator starts arguing moral superiority with his wife’s lover – with whom he is also in love – having caught the man in flagrante with his own half-sister, the reader’s head spins. (It is not, by the way, essential to always follow exactly what is happening. The whirlwind is part of the fun. Martin Amis, reviewing a collection of John Updike’s essays, illustrated of Updike’s vast reserves of knowledge by observing that ‘he even knows what’s going on in a novel by Iris Murdoch’.) 

And there is plenty more rakish fun to come in A Severed Head , featuring everything from a samurai sword to an unexpected gift curled up in a box. The novel is full of exaggerated love, and love was a prime component in Murdoch’s work: she saw real love as akin to goodness, and the question of goodness was her other driver. ‘I wonder if you have the faintest idea how good you are?’ Martin’s wife Antonia asks him. ‘I’m beginning to realise,’ he replies. ‘It hurts so much, for one thing.’ 

Cover of the first UK edition of A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus, 1961

If you want to see her at the peak of her powers 

By the time The Sea, The Sea (1978) won the Booker Prize, Iris Murdoch’s themes – love, goodness, life versus art – were well established. This novel turned them all up to 11. Its narrator, former playwright Charles Arrowby, is her most monstrous narrator of all, and probably her most unreliable. Arrowby lives by the sea, where he cooks disgusting meals – boiled onions are a favourite ingredient, supplemented by ‘liberal use of the tin opener’ – and nurses his grievances. 

We spot the real Arrowby not just by seeing through his grandiose self-image – nobody sane could think so highly of themselves – but also through what he admits other people say about him. A newspaper calls him a ‘power-crazed monster’; a woman declares him a ‘rapacious magician’.  

The story is a stew of resentment, jealousy and even abduction, but it all feeds into Murdoch’s intentions as an old-fashioned moral novelist. Her husband John Bayley, in his memoir Iris (1998) wrote that she ‘hardly ever read a contemporary novel’. Murdoch wanted her fiction to teach us lessons: often the lesson being about freedom, and how doing what you want will affect those around you. 

One aspect of this fanciful story may have been inspired by life: like Arrowby, John Bayley was what one journalist called ‘a famously experimental chef’, specialising in recipes such as ‘Boil eggs in an electric kettle and then use the water for Nescafé.’ Murdoch and Bayley lived in Oxford in a house ‘in an advanced state of neglect’, described as ‘a still life with sherry bottles and Pringles tubes’. ‘We’ve never been much for housekeeping,’ Bayley understatedly told one visitor . 

Cover of the first UK edition of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus, 1978

One day Iris Murdoch will write a novel that is like a novel all the way through. But how dull that would be

If you’re short of time 

There’s no denying that Iris Murdoch’s books can be long: from the 1980s on, they mostly topped 500 pages. But she could deliver a satisfying story in as little as 160 pages, as we see in The Italian Girl (1964).  

Many familiar elements are present here in refined form. The story is about Edmund Narraway, returning to England for his mother’s funeral, and the pace is (relatively) sedate: but there are still eye-opening and jaw-dropping things. Edmund needs money from his mother’s estate, and must contend with his drunk brother, Otto, one in a line of Murdochian resentful men. ‘I could have been a good man if I hadn’t married. Sometimes I think women really are the source of all evil.’ 

Alongside the brothers are the women: Edmund’s niece Flora, who has a secret she shares with him; Otto’s apprentice’s sister, Elsa; and the Italian girl of the title, the longstanding and long-suffering household maid Isabel. Edmund’s problem is that everyone wants his help. ‘You lead a simple good life. You help people,’ says one. 

But Edmund is also the subject of mockery, when one character takes his goodness for a lack of passion. ‘Perhaps you don’t really like girls? Perhaps you prefer boys? But no – you don’t really like anything at all.’ Edmund’s jealousy of the other characters’ couplings makes this a perfect short example of how Murdoch animates moral dilemmas into farcical settings. (She co-adapted her novel A Severed Head as a West End comedy.) At one point in a race across an unstable landscape, Edmund wonders, ‘Was I pursuing or was I fleeing?’ Elsewhere, the Italian girl tells him: ‘I want emotion and pistol shots.’ You get all that here, and more.

Cover of the first UK edition of The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus, 1964

If you like a murder mystery 

It was once said of Booker winner Kingsley Amis that he would only read books that began, ‘A shot rang out.’ In that case, Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good – shortlisted for the very first Booker Prize in 1969 – would have been perfect for him. 

It’s a murder mystery: the first mystery being whether there was a murder at all, as civil servant Joseph Radeechy appears to shoot himself in his office in Whitehall, London. At the end of the first sentence, a colleague hears the ‘indubitable sound of a revolver shot’. By the end of the fourth paragraph, he hears ‘running steps’ – and the game is on. 

As always, there is plenty to chew on, with the eccentric cast of characters including a dog called Mingo: but this being a Murdoch novel, beneath the surface mystery lies another mystery, outlined by John Ducane, the lawyer who leads the investigation. He wants to be good – or rather to appear to be good. As a man everyone thinks is an upstanding citizen, he seems the polar opposite of Radeechy – who appears to have been involved in occult activity. But the title makes the point that niceness and goodness are not the same thing. 

Often there’s a balance in Murdoch’s novels between reality and unreality, where prosaic settings are coloured by heightened emotions and exaggerated elements, giving them a fantasy-like flavour. And this may be the novel of Murdoch’s which most draws on traditional fictional styles – a philosophical investigation you can curl up with – but retains all of her individuality. Reviewing it on publication in 1968, the New York Times – calling it her ‘best, most exciting and most successful book’ – Elizabeth Janeway also said, ‘One day Iris Murdoch will write a novel that is like a novel all the way through.’ But how dull that would be. 

Cover of the first UK edition of The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus, 1969

If you want to see where it all began 

The manic action that is such a delicious characteristic of Murdoch’s novels can make them so entertaining it’s hard to see the larger themes: such as how she sees love and art as the routes to truth. So her debut Under the Net (1954) is worthwhile not just in itself but as a starter course.  

It opens with a tease – ‘When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong’ – as we join the world of James ‘Jake’ Donaghue and his struggles with money and other people. But as Jake moves from self-interest to an understanding of the world around him, we see a linear character development that is clearer than in some of Murdoch’s later work. 

The relative simplicity of the story, however, still involves four people in varying degrees of love with one another. (Murdoch once said that happiness was ‘to be utterly absorbed in at least six other human beings’.) It’s this tug of involvement, what it lets us see but also what it hides, that drives the book. ‘We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives,’ observes Jake, ‘and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.’ 

Above all, Under the Net is a first novel of a meatiness and achievement that would make other debutants blush. It is an example too of how, in her books, a deep thinker like Murdoch allowed those characters who take life less seriously to escape unscathed. (See also Dora Greenfield in her 1958 novel The Bell , another good place to start.)  

Iris Murdoch was a productive writer of 26 novels and five works of philosophy. The critic Francis Wyndham pictured her ‘seated between two massive piles of manuscript, moving only to write, one pile of empty paper, the other full, her industry phenomenal’. She worked and reworked her themes over four decades, forever seeking to perfect her art. ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea,’ said Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince. ‘If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.’ In her 1974 novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine , the mystery writer Montague Small ‘wrote fluently and fast, hoping somehow that each novel would excuse and rescue its predecessor’. Murdoch herself took the same view, according to John Bayley, and would be only halfway through a book before declaring, ‘Oh I don’t think this one is much good, but better luck next time!’ 

And Under the Net is where it all began. The story starts here.

Cover of the first UK edition of Under The Net by Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus, 1954

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Home > Kingston School of Art > Research groups and resources > Iris Murdoch Archive

• Iris Murdoch Archive

Kingston University is now a world-class centre of excellence for expertise and primary resource material on the life and work of the renowned twentieth-century novelist and philosopher  Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) . The University has a long-term research interest in Iris Murdoch and holds extensive archives of her private libraries, her books, letters, publications and other smaller related archives and materials. This Special Collection provides a world-class resource not only for Murdoch scholars but also for researchers on twentieth century literature, philosophy, politics and theology. The Iris Murdoch Archive Project disseminates expertise on Murdoch's work under the Directorship of Dr Anne Rowe, a leading Murdoch scholar who publishes widely and lectures internationally on Murdoch's work. Murdoch's novels and philosophy are taught on the undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses within English Literature; Kingston University Press publishes the  Iris Murdoch Review  and is also the home of the Iris Murdoch Society, which has a world-wide membership.  

Biennial international conferences on Murdoch have been held at Kingston University since 2002 and the seventh conference, 'Archives and Afterlife', was held there on 12 and 13 September 2014. These conferences habitually attract over 100 delegates from around fifteen countries, and in 2014 the conference celebrated ten years of the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. It focused on how research undertaken in the Murdoch Archives has impacted on Murdoch scholarship. An exhibition of letters from Iris Murdoch to the painter Harry Weinberger, along with a selection of his paintings, took place in Kingston Museum from 5 - 27 September 2014 to coincide with the conference.  

Iris Murdoch  is now widely regarded as one of the most distinguished, prolific and intelligent of post-war British novelists as well as a deeply original and adventurous philosopher of the first importance. She wrote 26 novels between 1954 and 1995 and among many other prizes won the Whitbread prize in 1973 for  The Black Prince  and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978. Two of her philosophical works,  The Sovereignty of Good  in 1970 and  Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals  in 1992, broke new ground in re-introducing ethics as topic for discussion within the British philosophical tradition. Since the publication of Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (edited by Justin Broackes, Oxford University Press, 2012), Iris Murdoch's philosophy is earning an increasingly high profile in mainstream philosophical debate.  

The last decade has already witnessed a renaissance in Murdoch scholarship worldwide, largely due to a revival of the relationship between ethics and literature as an aspect of contemporary philosophical and literary debate. This renewed interest in Murdoch is generating international interest. The Metu British Novelists Conference in Ankara Turkey took Murdoch as its subject in 2008; the University of Barcelona hosted an exhibition on Murdoch in 2008-9, and the University of Porto in Portugal hosted a conference on Murdoch in 2009. In 2011, the Royal Society of Literature hosted a discussion of Murdoch's work at the Courtauld Institute in London and more than 200 people attended. A talk by the journalist and broadcaster Bidisha, also run by the RSL at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012, attracted a similar number. In August 2012, the BBC broadcast a 'Head to Head' programme on freedom and determinism in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch and David Pears. Between May 2012 and July 2013 the Iris Murdoch Archive Project ran a Community Project based on the letters of Iris Murdoch to the philosopher Philippa Foot with the help of a grant of £107,000 from the National Heritage Lottery Fund. In the past two years over 1,300 items from the Murdoch archives have been issued to visitors for research or other purposes. A conference on Iris Murdoch is being planned at Oxford Brookes University early in 2014. The Roma Tre University in Rome will hold its first international conference on Iris Murdoch's Philosophy in February 2014 where Dr Anne Rowe, the Director of the Iris Murdoch Archive Project, will be a plenary speaker. These events, and the many recent publications on Murdoch in the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA, pay testament to the intellectual strength of current Murdoch scholarship, and the importance of her work not only to academia but also to British heritage. 

Iris Murdoch and Kingston University

The Iris Murdoch Collections currently include the heavily annotated library from Murdoch's Oxford home. (The Oxford library, valued at £150,000, was purchased with the help of a £20,000 grant from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund in 2004.) It also houses the working archive of the acclaimed Murdoch scholar and Iris Murdoch's Official Biographer Peter J. Conradi (see Iris Murdoch:  The Saint and the Artist  [London: HarperCollins, 2001] and  Iris Murdoch: A Life  [London: HarperCollins, 2001]). The Conradi archive includes many interviews and letters to significant figures in Iris Murdoch's life, including the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Elias Canetti. Other acquisitions include: Iris Murdoch's library from her London home in Cornwall Gardens; her unpublished book on Heidegger; her notebook on Sartre, and other individual items that have been bought or gifted since 2004. These include 150 letters to an American writer, Roly Cochrane; more than 150 letters to the Canadian teacher and scholar, Scott Dunbar, and more than 100 letters to the painter, Barbara Dorf. In addition, 180 letters from Murdoch to an Oxford contemporary, Denis Paul, were purchased with the help of a grant from the Friends of the National Libraries in 2009. In 2010 the University acquired on permanent loan the letters from Murdoch to her Oxford friend, Hal Lidderdale, and most recently it has been gifted a run of between 300-400 letters from Murdoch to the painter Harry Weinberger, in which they discuss the work of many great painters.  

The most significant acquisition since 2004 is the run of 164 letters to the French writer Raymond Queneau. Written between 1946 and 1975, this crucially important letter run, which ranges over subjects such as Murdoch's embryonic writing career, her emotional well-being, her thoughts on God and on numerous philosophers, now provides fresh primary source material for researchers wishing to track Murdoch's intellectual development and identifies previously undetected influences in her novels. This purchase was supported by the V&A Purchase Grant Fund; the National Heritage Memorial Fund; the Breslauer Foundation (USA); the Friends of the National Libraries, Kingston University and the Iris Murdoch Society. The acquisition was reported in  the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, the Sunday   Times and other national newspapers. The story was also covered by the French and Italian Press and Dr Rowe was interviewed on Radio Moscow and on BBC Radio 4's  Woman's Hour . In 2012 the Centre acquired over 250 letters from Iris Murdoch to her lifelong friend the philosopher Philippa Foot with the help of a grant of £107,000 from National Lottery supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. This acquisition, and a related community project designed to break boundaries between academia and the local community, received wide national press coverage in  the Times  and  the Irish Times ,  the Telegraph  and the Guardian newspapers as well as on BBC Radio Dublin. The extent of this reportage demonstrates the level of public interest in Iris Murdoch's life and work in addition to her established intellectual and cultural significance to academia and British Heritage generally.

Most recently, in 2013, with the help of grants from the Friends of the National Libraries, the Iris Murdoch Archive Project has acquired approx. 300 letters from Iris Murdoch to her friend and student at the Royal College of Art, Rachel Fenner, now a well-known Environmental Sculptor, a small collection of 11 letters and 9 poems to Wallace Robson, Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford, to whom Iris Murdoch was once engaged to be married and 38 letters from Iris Murdoch to Sir Leo Pliatzky, a senior civil servant in the Treasury. Approx. 100 letters from Iris Murdoch to the Architect Stephen Gardiner have been kindly gifted to the Archives by his wife Joan Scotson. John Chrysostomides kindly loaned letters from Iris Murdoch to Julian Chrysostomides to the Archives for transcription. Julian Chrysostomides was a student of Murdoch's at Oxford. 

New collections

For the most up to date information on new archival collections please visit the Archives blog .

Staff attached to the Iris Murdoch Archive Project

Information about the archives is also available  online .  Researchers attached to the project are:

• Dr Anne Rowe (consultant)
• Dr Frances White
• Dr Pamela Osborn

Dayna Miller Archivist Email: [email protected]

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Who really knew Iris?

Iris Murdoch Peter J Conradi HarperCollins £24.99, pp706

I knew Iris Murdoch - pretty well, I think - for 30 years, and my immediate response after reading this life of her by my assiduous homonym (who shares my middle initial but has a snazzy Sephardic variant of my surname) is to realise that I did not know her at all.

My memories of her are still shockingly vivid and intense. That blunt, bold, deliberate handwriting on letters and postcards, like the unjoined-up lettering of a preternaturally intelligent child. The way she once materialised in a corner of my college rooms in Oxford, smiling at me and enjoying the few moments of invisibility she had enjoyed: I yelped when I saw her, as if I had seen a ghost. Her boy-soprano singing voice, which treated me on another occasion to a rendition of 'Waltzing Matilda', and the growly brogue of the same voice in another register when she argued with me. Her helpless laughter, her showers of tears. The way our teeth clashed when she gave me a kiss, and the darting, adder-like sorties (am I being caddish?) of her tongue between my lips.

But how do you reconcile the wise omniscience of the mind and the flirtatious waywardness of the body? When we first met, she seemed as impersonal as an angel, until - in a copybook example of what the existentialists called a gratuitous action - she abruptly de-levitated and lured me out on a pub crawl.

I had my Iris; I had no way of knowing how many others had theirs. She asked questions (and often requested that I tell her three interesting things about my day, which turned me into a storyteller and occasional liar, though it also had the charmed effect of making the dreariest day interesting), but never answered them. Obliquity, evasiveness or downright secrecy kept her multifarious aspects separate. Among the myths she loved was that of Psyche, inducted into heavenly bliss by Cupid, then sworn to silence about forbidden delights. He sealed her lips by placing his finger over them. She illustrated the point with her finger on my face. I understood the embargo, although kisses breached it.

The great achievement of her emotional life, as narrated by Conradi, was to ensure that no one knew about her affair with Elias Canetti. From her marriage to John Bayley in 1956 until her death in 1999, even her closest friends thought Canetti had been merely her guru, not her sadistic sexual tormenter. In Bayley's own memoir of Iris, he denied she had ever got intimately entangled with any of the lesbians she befriended. Conradi, however, has discovered that she resigned her fellowship at St Anne's in 1962 because the college principal warned her about 'a mutually obsessional attachment to a woman colleague'.

Nevertheless, it's a sign of Conradi's tact that, even after his access to her journals and his dogged disinterring of ancient lovers, he allows Iris to remain mysterious, or at least insolubly contradictory, her warring motives masked by that ambiguous Gioconda smile.

She despised psychotherapy, and said she analysed herself in her novels; interestingly, she supervised a doctorate on allegory by A.D. Nuttall which required her to read Prudentia's Psychomachia, which represents the mind as a battlefield, as hers was.

Her philosophical high-mindedness clashed with her romantic attraction to fables and fairy tales. She delighted in erotic danger: one of her early lovers was the anthropologist Franz Steiner, an expert on tribal taboos and their infringement. (Conradi wonders whether she might have enticed him to defy a medical taboo by having sex with her and risking his weak heart; he surmises that Steiner died while they were making love.) Yet this alarmingly diffused, indiscriminate sexual energy was exorcised or pacified by the innocence or happy infantilism of her marriage to Bayley.

They reminded Stephen Spender of Hansel and Gretel, with no suspicion of incest. Bayley volunteered to be her 'child-bride'; she calls him 'puss' in her journals, and often in my hearing addressed him as 'old chicken' - not exactly sexual endearments.

When the disparities between principle and practice obtruded, Iris simply denied them. (Her Protestant Irishness often manifested itself in statements of table-thumping absolutism.) Despite her own feckless youth, she censured promiscuity in an interview with Adam Mars-Jones in 1985. Conradi too easily assumes that 'she had no memory of her own bohemianism'; the issue of her later reactionariness is one he prefers to dodge. When I lamented the Falklands war, Iris told me that I couldn't understand what was being fought about 'because you're not English'. Hardly a philosophically respectable way to win an argument, especially coming from one who was so proud of having been born in Dublin.

Bayley, wooing her, knew what would be required of him, and said: 'I could live in any contradiction indefinitely with you, and never mind the mornings when one wakes up early and alone.' She advised him how to cope with her malleability by citing another myth: 'Simply hang on to me as if I were Proteus.'

Conradi traces the protean facility of her metamorphoses back to Canetti's theory of Verwandlungen, which celebrated the individual's fission into a quarrelsome company of personae. At first, this seemed like a deviously magical power: Canetti, as Conradi demonstrates, is the prototype for the devilish enchanters in her novels. Yet it also entailed a Shakespearean self-negation which made it a sacred grace rather than a devious profane talent. Canetti, Iris said, had enough selves to stock a 'Hindu pantheon' (and, like those randy polymorphous gods, a goodly supply of willing houris).

Covering the transition between sex and spirit, she called Canetti an 'angel-demon'. All of Iris herself is in that shaky, splicing hyphen. She is becoming harder to understand, now that the process of sanctification is under way: in a forthcoming film, she is impersonated by Judi Dench, the English epitome of sweet, fubsy domestic cosiness. All her life, people deified her. At Oxford, Denis Healey called the communistic Iris a 'latter-day Joan of Arc'. But, as she told her lover Frank Thompson when reporting that she had lost her virginity while he was away at the war (in which he was killed), 'I'm not a Blessed Damozel you know.'

No, indeed: in the reminiscences of others, she often resembles Lilith, Lucifera, Salome and their fatal mythic sisters. Olivier Todd, who knew her at Cambridge after the war, could not decide whether her aura was redolent of roses or sulphur. She cast her Oxford tutor Donald Mackinnon - a famously disincarnated brain, on whom Tom Stoppard partly modelled the philosopher in Jumpers - as Christ, and called herself the penitent harlot Mary Magdalene. Mackinnon, whose marriage frayed as a result of their intense but cerebral liaison, denounced her in 1992, declaring 'there was real evil there'.

She could, as Conradi admits, be a predatory, merciless Venus. Perhaps Iris made atonement for this tendency to hurt others by volunteering in turn to be hurt by them. A character in The Black Prince announces that 'of course Shakespeare was a masochist', though Conradi hastily chastens the assertion by arguing that masochism here means 'that healing surrender to the otherness of the world which is for Iris an aspect of virtue'. Remembering her joy in Canetti's violent sexual conscription of her (usually in an armchair, with his wife in the next room preparing supper for them), I am unconvinced.

She expected such casual brutality from intellectual mentors. During the Thatcher years, she badgered Kenneth Baker about funding cuts for education, but despite her worship of Socrates and his tutorial methods, she found perversity in pedagogy. A teacher, she told a friend who was setting out to become one, can employ 'a certain sadism but ideally' (and here Iris the Platonist slips in) 'this should be entirely veiled'. Another of her Oxford tutors, Eduard Fraenkel, notoriously pawed his female students. Iris accepted this as part of the learning process.

Conradi never really confronts such inconsistencies, or else he finesses them with a slack New Age transcendentalism. He teases critics who treat the novels as gospels, but his own early study of the fiction, to which he often refers, is called The Saint and the Artist. He has intrepidly researched the first half of her life - her wartime job in Whitehall, her postwar work with refugees in Austria, and those experimental amours - but after 1956 his account loses focus, and the woman becomes a machine manufacturing novels. Oddly, he's least revealing on the years during which he knew her, first as a fan and finally as a carer.

Perhaps he feels pre-empted by Bayley's memoirs of her anguished but ultimately placid loss of identity. I suspect, however, that the problem lies in his allegorical or mystical veneration of her. They explored Buddhism and yoga together; Conradi's beliefs make him credulous about the paranormal phenomena in her last books, and he shares the reverence of the water-diviner who, when a willow rod 'jumped violently out of her hands at the very spot for a well' on the Spenders' property in Provence, commented: 'Madame à la fluide.'

At the very end of his book, he fudges criticism of Bayley's harrowing account of her last years by remarking: 'Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara sees the Bodhisattva as willing to be, according to the needs of the Other, like a bridge, a boat, or a road.' I know I'm an unsoulful earthling, but that to me is mumbo-jumbo and it covers unclear or incomplete thinking.

Still, Conradi's Buddhism is a guarantee of modesty. He is unpossessive about Iris, and begins by acknowledging that this will not be the last biography of her. I doubt that anyone else will succeed in solving the mystery, and I hope not. Bayley once argued that great fictional characters, like those of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, remain unknowable, endlessly surprising us and renewing our infatuation with them. Iris - now such a mythic, metamorphic character herself - is the living proof of that proposition.

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