Misplaced Pages

#394605

49-480: Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE ( / ˈ m ɜːr d ɒ k / MUR -dok ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil , sexual relationships , morality , and the power of the unconscious . Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of

98-466: A " moral realism or 'naturalism', allowing into the world cases of such properties as humility or generosity; an anti‐scientism; a rejection of Humean moral psychology ; a sort of ' particularism '; special attention to the virtues; and emphasis on the metaphor of moral perception or 'seeing' moral facts." The reasons for this are unclear, but the Scottish literary critic, G. S. Fraser notes that, in

147-847: A Council (composed of representatives of all state parties) with a Central Committee representing the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. The other countries who signed the agreement included: Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, the French Committee of National Liberation , Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. Although

196-616: A claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American". Conradi notes A. N. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in The Red and the Green , and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978. The novel, while broad of sympathy, is hardly an unambiguous celebration of the 1916 rising, dwelling upon bloodshed, unintended consequences and

245-699: A collection of unpublished memoirs was published by Sabrestorm Press, entitled Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration , edited by Miles Leeson, who directs the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester , UK. In 2015, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an Iris Murdoch season, with several memoirs by people who knew her, and dramatisations of her novels: In March 2019, the London-based production company Rebel Republic Films announced that it had optioned The Italian Girl , and

294-489: A friendship with Murdoch that extended from a meeting at her Gifford Lectures to her death. The book was well received. John Updike commented: "There would be no need to complain of literary biographies [...] if they were all as good". The text addresses many popular questions about Murdoch, such as how Irish she was and what her politics were. Though not a trained philosopher, Conradi's interest in Murdoch's achievement as

343-458: A long and turbulent love relationship with writer Brigid Brophy . Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net , was published in 1954. She had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She went on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama. In 1976 she was named a Commander of

392-443: A moral task: she will change her view of D, making it more accurate, less marred by selfishness. She gives herself exercises in vision: where she is inclined to say 'coarse,' she will say, and see, 'spontaneous.' Where she is inclined to say 'common,' she will say, and see, 'fresh and naive.' As time goes on, the new images supplant the old. Eventually M does not have to make such an effort to control her actions: they flow naturally from

441-448: A mother-in-law, M, who has contempt for D, her daughter-in-law. M sees D as common, cheap, low. Since M is a self-controlled Englishwoman, she behaves (so Murdoch stipulates) with perfect graciousness all the while, and no hint of her real view surfaces in her acts. But she realises, too, that her feelings and thoughts are unworthy, and likely to be generated by jealousy and an excessively keen desire to hang on to her son. So she sets herself

490-436: A philosopher were eclipsed by her success as a novelist, but recent appraisals have increasingly accorded her a substantial role in postwar Anglo-American philosophy, particularly for her unfashionably prescient work in moral philosophy and her reinterpretation of Aristotle and Plato . Martha Nussbaum has argued for Murdoch's "transformative impact on the discipline" of moral philosophy because she directed her analysis not at

539-481: A refugee camp. She left the UNRRA in 1946. From 1947 to 1948, Iris Murdoch studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge . She met Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge but did not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrived. In 1948 she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford , where she taught philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967, she taught one day

SECTION 10

#1732779769395

588-551: A singer before Iris was born, and was from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Iris Murdoch's parents first met in Dublin when her father was on leave and were married in 1918. Iris was the couple's only child. When she was a few weeks old the family moved to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk . She was a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch . Murdoch

637-539: A sophisticated Gothic romance , or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing. The Black Prince , for which Murdoch won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize , is a study of erotic obsession , and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious "editor" of

686-489: A student at St Anne’s. An authorised collection of her poetic writings, Poems by Iris Murdoch , appeared in 1997, edited by Paul Hullah and Yozo Muroya. Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels An Unofficial Rose and The Bell . J. B. Priestley 's dramatisation of her 1961 novel A Severed Head starred Ian Holm and Richard Attenborough . In 1988

735-597: A thinker is evident in the biography, and yet more so in his earlier work of literary criticism, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of Iris Murdoch's Works (Macmillan, 1986; HarperCollins, 2001). He also recalled his personal encounters with Murdoch in Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me (Short Books, 2005). Conradi's archive of material on Murdoch, together with Iris Murdoch's Oxford library,

784-784: A week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art . In 1956, Murdoch married John Bayley , a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic partnership lasted more than forty years until Murdoch's death. Bayley thought that sex was "inescapably ridiculous". Murdoch in contrast had "multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, [Bayley] witnessed for himself". Notably she had

833-713: Is held at Kingston University . An account of Murdoch's life with a different ambition is given by A. N. Wilson in his 2003 book Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her . The work was described by Galen Strawson in The Guardian as "mischievously revelatory" and labelled by Wilson himself as an "anti-biography". David Morgan met Iris Murdoch in 1964, when he was a student at the Royal College of Art. His 2010 memoir With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch , describes their lifelong friendship. John Bayley wrote two memoirs of his life with Iris Murdoch. Iris: A Memoir

882-847: Is nothing in Anscombe's writing which reflects any of these. Her philosophical work was influenced by Simone Weil (from whom she borrows the concept of 'attention'), and by Plato , under whose banner she claimed to fight. In re-animating Plato, she gives force to the reality of the Good, and to a sense of the moral life as a pilgrimage from illusion to reality. From this perspective, Murdoch's work offers perceptive criticism of Kant, Sartre and Wittgenstein ('early' and 'late'). Her most central parable, which appears in The Sovereignty of Good , asks us (in Nussbaum's succinct account), "to imagine

931-563: Is said to have modelled on her lover, the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti . Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea , a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired stage director who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart. It was dedicated to archaeologist Rosemary Cramp , who had been

980-498: Is the sensitive aspect of Murdoch's political life that has attracted interest. Part of the interest revolves around the fact that, although Irish by both birth and traced descent on both sides, Murdoch did not display the full set of political opinions that are sometimes assumed to go with this origin. Biographer Peter Conradi wrote: "No one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris's Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish ... [But] Iris has as valid

1029-760: The Hamburg -based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Murdoch its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of her life's work. In 1997, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". Harold Bloom wrote in his 1986 review of The Good Apprentice that "no other contemporary British novelist" seemed of her "eminence". A. S. Byatt called her "a great philosophical novelist". James Wood wrote in How Fiction Works : "In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that

SECTION 20

#1732779769395

1078-914: The International Refugee Organization and the World Health Organization . As an American relief project, it was later replaced by the Marshall Plan , which began operations in 1948. However, the historian Jessica Reinisch has proposed that UNRRA should not just figure as a chapter in U.S. history, but rather that UNRRA was unique in that it managed to bring together very different partners and models of international relief, each of which had their own history and antecedents. The First World War displaced more refugees than in Europeans' living memory, first from Belgium in 1914, later in eastern Europe, cf.

1127-792: The Order of the British Empire and in 1987 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was awarded honorary degrees by Durham University (DLitt, 1977), the University of Bath (DLitt, 1983), University of Cambridge (1993) and Kingston University (1994), among others. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. The house at 30 Charlbury Road where she lived with her husband from 1989 to her death has an Oxfordshire blue plaque. Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma ,

1176-658: The 11,000,000 non-Germans who had been moved into Germany during the war, but did not render assistance to ethnic Germans. In Asia, the organization provided assistance in the Dutch East Indies , Korea, and China (including Taiwan). China was the largest recipient of funds. UNRRA Headquarters was in Washington, D.C., and the European Regional Office was set up in London. The organization

1225-420: The 20th century . Her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize . In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Her other books include The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and

1274-842: The Communist-governed areas of the country. These tensions worsened during the Chinese Civil War. By 1947, UNRRA was running nearly 800 resettlement camps, housing over 700,000 people. Forty-four nations contributed to funding, supplying, and staffing the agency, of which the United States was the leading donor. The largest recipients of UNRRA commodity aid, in millions of US dollars were China, $ 518; Poland – $ 478; Italy – $ 418; Yugoslavia – $ 416; Greece – $ 347; Czechoslovakia – $ 261; Ukraine (USSR) – $ 188; and Austria – $ 136. A number of academic assessments state that UNRRA

1323-558: The Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), 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). As a philosopher, Murdoch's best-known work is The Sovereignty of Good (1970). She was married for 43 years, until her death, to the literary critic and author John Bayley . Murdoch

1372-663: The UNRRA was called a "United Nations" agency, it was established prior to the founding of the United Nations . The explanation for this is that the term "United Nations" was used at the time to refer to the Allies of World War II , having been originally coined for that purpose by Roosevelt in 1942. Although initially restricted by its constitution to render aid only to nationals from the United Nations (the Allies), this

1421-513: The agency distributed about $ 4 billion worth of goods, food, medicine, tools, and farm implements at a time of severe global shortages and worldwide transportation difficulties. The recipient nations had been especially hard hit by starvation, dislocation, and political chaos. It played a major role in helping Displaced persons return to their home countries in Europe in 1945–46. Many of its functions were transferred to several UN agencies, including

1470-525: The approval of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China; he later obtained endorsements from 40 other governments to form the first "United Nations" organization. The Agreement for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration founding document was signed by 44 countries in the White House in Washington on 9 November 1943. UNRRA was headed by a Director-General and governed by

1519-436: The book in a series of afterwords. Though her novels differ markedly, and her style developed, themes recur. Her novels often include upper-middle-class male intellectuals caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, refugees, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters—a type of man Murdoch

Iris Murdoch - Misplaced Pages Continue

1568-558: The civil wars and new national boundaries of 1917–19. Relief was undertaken largely by private charities, often American as organized by Herbert Hoover . The Second World War seemed likely to create still more refugees, prompting governments to act: U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the agency in June 1943, to provide relief to areas liberated from Axis Powers when the fighting ended. Roosevelt had already obtained

1617-446: The creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom." He stressed that some authors, "like Tolstoy , Trollope , Balzac and Dickens ", wrote about people different from themselves by choice, whereas others, such as " James , Flaubert , Lawrence , Woolf ", have more interest in the self. Wood called Murdoch "poignant", because she spent her whole life writing in

1666-573: The evils of romanticism, besides celebrating selfless individuals on both sides. Later, of Ian Paisley , Murdoch stated "[he] sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12–15 years of murderous IRA activity. All this business is deep in my soul, I'm afraid." In private correspondence with her close friend and fellow philosopher Philippa Foot , she remarked in 1978 that she felt "unsentimental about Ireland to

1715-459: The inner lives of individuals, follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoyevsky , Tolstoy , George Eliot , and Proust , besides showing an abiding love of Shakespeare . There is however great variety in her achievement, and the richly layered structure and compelling realistic comic imagination of The Black Prince (1973) is very different from the early comic work Under the Net (1954) or The Unicorn (1963). The Unicorn can be read as

1764-522: The late 1940s, the philosophers who were then occupying Murdoch's attention were late Victorian British idealists, such as T. H. Green , F. H. Bradley , and Bernard Bosanquet . Broackes also notes that Murdoch's influence on the discipline of philosophy was sometimes indirect since it impacted both her contemporaries and the following generation of philosophers, particularly Elizabeth Anscombe , Philippa Foot , John McDowell , and Bernard Williams . She sent copies of her earlier novels to Anscombe, but there

1813-580: The latter category, while she struggled to fit herself into the former. Murdoch won a scholarship to study at Vassar College in the US in 1946, but was refused a visa because she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938, while a student at Oxford. She left the party in 1942, when she went to work at the Treasury, but remained sympathetic to communism for several years. In later years she

1862-554: The once-dominant matters of will and choice, but at those of attention (how people learn to see and conceive of one another) and phenomenal experience (how the sensory "thinginess" of life shapes moral sensibility). Because as Calley A. Hornbuckle puts, “For Murdoch, the most essential kind of knowledge is the knowledge that other people exist”. In a recent survey of Murdoch's philosophical work, Justin Broackes points to several distinctive features of Murdoch's moral philosophy, including

1911-510: The point of hatred" and, of a Franco-Irish conference she had attended in Caen in 1982, said that "the sounds of all those Irish voices made me feel privately sick. They just couldn't help sympathising with the IRA, like Americans do. A mad bad world". Peter J. Conradi 's 2001 biography was the fruit of long research and authorised access to journals and other papers. It is also a labour of love, and of

1960-454: The way she has come to see D." This is how M cultivates a pattern of behavior that leads her to view D "justly or lovingly". The parable is partly meant to show (against Oxford contemporaries including R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire ) the importance of the "inner" life to moral action. Seeing another correctly can depend on overcoming jealousy, and discoveries about the world involve inner work. Her novels, in their attention and generosity to

2009-572: Was allowed to visit the United States, but always had to obtain a waiver from the provisions of the McCarran Act , which barred Communist Party members and former members from entering the country. In a 1990 Paris Review interview, she said that her membership of the Communist Party had made her see "how strong and how awful it [Marxism] is, certainly in its organized form". Aside from her Communist Party membership, her Irish heritage

Iris Murdoch - Misplaced Pages Continue

2058-521: Was awarded a first-class honours degree in 1942. After leaving Oxford she went to work in London for HM Treasury . In June 1944, she left the Treasury and went to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). At first, she was stationed in London at the agency's European Regional Office. In 1945, she was transferred first to Brussels , then to Innsbruck , and finally to Graz , Austria, where she worked in

2107-678: Was born in Phibsborough , Dublin , Ireland , the daughter of Irene Alice ( née Richardson, 1899–1985) and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant , came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall , County Down . In 1915, he enlisted as a soldier in King Edward's Horse and served in France during the First World War before being commissioned as a Second lieutenant . Her mother had trained as

2156-691: Was brought up in Chiswick and educated privately , entering the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925 and attending Badminton School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938, she went up to Somerville College, Oxford , with the intention of studying English, but switched to " Greats ", a course of study combining classics, ancient history, and philosophy. At Oxford she studied philosophy with Donald M. MacKinnon and attended Eduard Fraenkel 's seminars on Agamemnon . She

2205-486: Was changed late in 1944, in response to pleas from Jewish organizations who were concerned with the fate of surviving Jews of German nationality, to also include "other persons who have been obliged to leave their country or place of origin or former residence or who have been deported therefrom by action of the enemy because of race, religion or activities in favor of the United Nations." UNRRA operated in occupied Germany, primarily in camps for displaced persons , especially

2254-997: Was developing a screenplay based on the book. Novels Short Stories Philosophy Plays Poetry collections Source: Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Kingston University Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.150 via cp1114 cp1114, Varnish XID 917237135 Upstream caches: cp1114 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:42:49 GMT United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration UNRRA cooperated closely with dozens of volunteer charitable organizations, who sent hundreds of their own staff to work alongside UNRRA. In operation for only four years,

2303-570: Was published in 1995. Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died in 1999 in Oxford. There is a bench dedicated to her in the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford , where she used to enjoy walking. Dublin City Council and the Irish postal service marked the centenary of Murdoch's birth in 2019 by unveiling a commemorative plaque and postage stamp at her birthplace. For some time, Murdoch's influence and achievements as

2352-500: Was published in the United Kingdom in 1998, shortly before her death. The American edition, which was published in 1999, was called Elegy for Iris . A sequel entitled Iris and Her Friends was published in 1999, after her death. Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre 's film Iris (2001), based on Bayley's memories of his wife as she developed Alzheimer's disease. In her centenary year, 2019,

2401-636: Was subject to the authority of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) in Europe and was directed by three Americans during the four years of its existence: UNRRA funds became a point of tension in the relations between the United States and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government of China when Chiang pushed to control the disposition of funds in China to ensure that relief funds did not go to

#394605