Iris Murdoch
A novelist and philosopher who examined the difficulty of seeing other people clearly.
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She grew up in London, studied classics and philosophy at Oxford and worked in post-war refugee relief before returning to academic life. Philosophy remained a foundation of her fiction as well as a separate field of work.
Her first novel, “Under the Net” (1954), began a career of twenty-six novels concerned with love, freedom, illusion and moral responsibility. “The Sea, The Sea” won the Booker Prize in 1978. In “The Sovereignty of Good” (1970), she explored attention to others as an ethical task.
Murdoch married the literary critic John Bayley in 1956. Their long marriage coexisted with other intense attachments, including her relationship with the writer Brigid Brophy. Their surviving letters reveal affection, jealousy and an intellectual exchange that also entered Murdoch’s literary life. Her relationships with both women and men have led biographers to describe her as bisexual.
Alzheimer’s disease affected her final years, later described in Bayley’s memoirs and the film “Iris” (2001). She died in Oxford in 1999, aged 79.