Iris Murdoch 1919 -1999

1919 Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin to a family of modest means and background. Her mother, Irene Richardson, was a North Dubliner, a member of the Church of Ireland (Anglican), who sang in her church choir. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, was orphaned in New Zealand and sent to Ireland to be cared for by his Ulster Dissenting sheep farming relatives.

1921 The family moved to London after the creation of the Irish Free State. Hughes Murdoch worked as a civil servant.

1925-1931 Murdoch attended Froebel Demonstration School, which was progressive and academically rigorous.

1932-1938 She boarded at Badminton School, where she studied Latin and Greek and was exposed to a progressive view of current events. The school offered scholarships for refugees.

1938-1942 Murdoch won an Open Exhibition for Merit at Somerville College, Oxford. She studied Mods (Classical Greek and Latin) and Greats (Ancient History and Philosophy). She took a first in Greats.

Her Greats tutor was Donald MacKinnon, a Christian moral philosopher. She took an Agamemnon Seminar with Eduard Fraenkel. Both had lasting influences on Murdoch's life and thought.

1938 Iris Murdoch joined the Communist Party at Oxford. It is not clear when she resigned, though she probably left the party by 1946.

1942-1944 During the war Murdoch was assigned to an administrative position in Treasury.

1944-1946 She worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in refugee camps in Brussels and Austria.

1947 - 1948 Murdoch received a scholarship for post-graduate work at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She read Simone Weil's The Need for Roots, which articulated her experience in the camps of the evil of displacement, a theme that runs through many of Murdoch's books.

Murdoch published Sartre:Romantic Rationalist, beginning a lifelong critique of existentialism for its emphasis on the heroic self, its inadequate sense of the Other, its dismissal of the authenticity of suffering and of the long hard task of deselfing.

She made several retreats at Malling Abbey, an Anglican cloistered community, during this year, possibly under the influence of Donald MacKinnon.

1948-1963 Iris Murdoch was Fellow at St Anne's, Oxford, where she taught moral and political philosophy.

1954 She published Under the Net, the first of 26 novels.

Murdoch was diagnosed as partially deaf.

1956 Murdoch married John Bayley.

1963-1967 She was Lecturer at the Royal College of Art.

1970 Severe arthritis made it increasingly different for Murdoch to pen her manuscripts by hand.

1974 Murdoch received the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine.

1978 She was awarded the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea.

1987 Murdoch was honored as a Dame of the British Empire.

1993 Murdoch began to suffer the early effects of Alzheimer's Disease.

1994 A University of Chicago Conference honored Murdoch's work.

1999 Iris Murdoch died. Her ashes were scattered in the garden at the Oxford Crematorium.

NOTE: Special thanks to Judith Guttman of Madison, Wisconsin for this Chronology and for her contributions to the Bibliography of works by and about Iris Murdoch listed below.

Bibliography

• Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
• The Sovereignty of Good - based on her Cambridge Leslie Stephen Lectures (1970)
• The Fire and the Sun (1977)
• Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
• Existentialists and Mystics (1997)
• Video Lectures on YouTube:

  Philosophy and Literature an interview of Murdoch by Bryan Magee:

  1. Philosophy and Literature: Part 1
  2. Philosophy and Literature: Part 2
  3. Philosophy and Literature: Part 3
  4. Philosophy and Literature: Part 4
  5. Philosophy and Literature: Part 5

Fiction

• Under the Net (1954)
• The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)
• The Sandcastle (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)

Plays

• A Severed Head (with J.B. Priestley, 1964)
• The Italian Girl (with James Saunders, 1969)
• The Three Arrows & The Servants and the Snow (1973)
• The Servants - a libretto for an opera by William Mathias(1980)
• Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986)
• The Black Prince (1987)
• Joanna, Joanna - BBC Radio 3 (1987)
• The One Alone - BBC Radio 3 (1987)

• A Year of Birds (1978; revised edition, 1984)
• Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997)

SPECIAL NOTE: Iris Murdoch Papers at the Universityof Iowa, USA.

Useful Secondary sources:

A list of articles with links to texts can be found at Iris Murdoch Society

Peter J Conradi, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch (2001)and The Saint and the Artist (1986, 2001)

A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (1965, and updated with later essays)

John Bailey, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1999)This was published in USA as Elegy for Iris.

Know more about this philosopher?

Do you know some interesting facts about this philosopher or her work? Share your information.

Buy Murdoch books at:

ABEbooks AbeBooks - Free Shipping Also, you can click the circle about the FIND button to search their complete inventory - notjust dealers offering free shipping

ABE for the UK - free shipping

Amazon - the most popular but not always the cheapest. Shop Amazon.com

Barnes and Noble Buy and receive Fast Free Delivery

Biblio - smaller, supports Independent bookstores, often has savings over the big book sites. Save on 50 million quality used books at Biblio.com.