IRIS MURDOCH LIFE EB

Peter J. Conradi

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780006531753
• eBook ISBN: 9780007380008
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A full and revealing biography of one of the century's greatest English writers and an icon to a generation.

Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A.S.Byatt notes, she is 'absolutely central to our culture'. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognisable Murdoch world, and the adjective 'Murdochian' has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interract intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well known; hers has been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. For Iris's formative years, astonishingly, movingly and intimately documented by Conradi's meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured World War II, and her life like her books, was full of the most extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of that turbulent time and after.

Peter Conradi was very close to both Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Iris's husband, whose memoir of their life together has itself been the subject of an enormous amount of attention and acclaim. This will be an extraordinarily full biography, for there are vast resources in diaries and papers and friends' recollections, and while it is a superlative biography it is also a superb history of a generation who have profoundly influenced our world today.

Table of contents

• IRIS MURDOCH
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I INNOCENCE Fairy-Tale Princess 1919–1944
• 1 ‘You ask how Irish she is?’ 1616–1925
• 2 No Mean City 1925—1932
• 3 The Clean-Cut Rational World 1932—1938
• 4 A Very Grand Finale 1938–1939
• 5 Madonna Bolshevicka 1939–1942
• 6 This Love Business 1942–1943
• 7 ‘A la Guerre, comme à la Guerre’ 1943–1944
• 8 A Madcap Tale 1944–1946
• II INNOCENCE LOST Storm and Stress 1944–1956
• 9 Displaced Persons 1946–1947
• 10 Cambridge 1947–1948
• 11 St Anne’s 1948–1952
• 12 Franz Baermann Steiner– 1951-1952
• 13 Conversations with a Prince 1952–1956
• 14 An Ideal Co-Child 1953–1956
• III INNOCENCE REGAINED Wise Child 1956–1999
• 15 Cedar Lodge 1956–1961
• 16 Island of Spells 1961–1965
• 17 What a Decade! 1965–1969
• 18 Shakespeare and Friends 1970–1978
• 19 Discontinuities 1971–1978
• 20 Icons and Patriarchs 1978–1994
• 21 ‘Past speaking of 1994–1999
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• About the Author
• AFTERWORD
• Copyright
• About the Publisher