Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)

Iris Murdoch is introduced as a writer of brave and open –minded novels that are not only idiosyncratic in their dealing with issues that push against accepted moral and social boundaries but also relevant to the everyday experiences of all types of readers. With reference to significant biographical information the chapter suggests why her novels have carved out her place in British culture in the late twentieth century and outlines the ways in which her often tortuous personal relationships and complex personality are inextricably entwined with her art. The considerable media attention she has attracted since her death in 1999 is evaluated and the reasons for the fluctuations within the critical reception of Murdoch’s novels over four decades are explained. The introduction concludes with summaries of the following four chapters on Murdoch’s philosophy, theology, aesthetics and settings.

‘Onward!’1

This final chapter identifies Murdoch’s novels as relevant to the social, religious and political issues that are dominating the second decade of the twenty-first century and evaluates her current status within the English canon. The vast amount of documentation relating to her life and work now available in the Iris Murdoch Archives at Kingston University identifies hers as one of the most extensively catalogued literary lives of the twentieth century, and this chapter illustrates some of the ways in which this fresh information is already changing perceptions of Iris Murdoch as a writer, a philosopher and a woman. It concludes by reiterating her unshakeable belief that wisdom and moral improvement would come out of intellectually distinguished thinking embodied in artistic expression, and that art, not God, was the medium by which humanity could be nudged closer to a healthy psychological state, which is also a state of moral goodness.

Writing the Novel of Ideas: The Philosopher and Public Intellectual

Murdoch’s place as a writer in the tradition of ‘the novel of ideas’, is explored in this chapter, as are the ways in which her political views and her standing as a public intellectual impact on novels that she denied were intentionally informed by either. The reasons why Murdoch’s moral philosophy was not well received on its publication are explained as is its current significance in the field of Virtue Ethics. The chapter moves on to illustrate the ways that her philosophy covertly infiltrates her novels without any trace of didacticism, and the difficult moral paradoxes it raises. It looks at the function of the many amateur and professional philosophers who feature in the novels before it moves on to explore how Murdoch’s robust opinions on political and social issues covertly inform novels in ways which have never been fully acknowledged by literary critics.

Writing the Landscape: The Island of Spells and the Sacred City

This chapter discusses the two geographical environments that predominantly shape Iris Murdoch’s identity and her fiction: Ireland, her birthplace, the ‘island of spells’, and London, the city in which she spent much of her life and spoke of as ‘sacred’. It first explores Murdoch’s often tortuous relationship with her homeland and the political upheavals that engulfed it during her lifetime, then moves on to illustrate how this ambivalence is reflected in a number of her Irish characters and the metaphorical fogs and mists that characterise her two ‘Irish’ novels The Unicorn and The Red and The Green. The second half of this chapter celebrates her less equivocal love of London, the dominant setting in twenty-four of the twenty-six novels, which is celebrated with an extraordinary acuity of detail. The chapter concludes with discussions of the ways in which the London settings serve multiple symbolic functions that include a sophisticated awareness of the complex connections between psychological well-being and the environment, distinctly feminist explorations of the male psyche, and an encoded system of images that points toward the moral issues within the novels.

Writing Sacraments: The Holy Atheist

Theologically Murdoch did not subscribe to a belief in the existence of a personal God, yet claimed that everything she had written was concerned with holiness. This chapter is dedicated to what can be described as a ‘sacramental’ aspect of her novels, as it traces her engagement with various spiritual outlooks and outlines her ‘Godless theology’, in which she envisages how one can lead a religious life without the trappings of conventional faith. After outlining her personal vacillation between belief and non-belief, her concerns about the decline of religious faith in the West, especially Christianity, and her fears for the individual well-being of those who could no longer subscribe to any religious creed, it outlines the basic tenets of her Platonism and her encompassing of Buddhism into her own personal ‘neo-theology’.

A Writing Life: 1954–1995

This chapter describes how Murdoch’s ambitions to be a writer were fostered in childhood, and moves on to acknowledge the insecurities and depressions that haunted her later in life, despite her many achievements and the winning of prestigious literary prizes. After exploring the reasons for the popularity of her novels, as well as acknowledging their deep moral and philosophical seriousness, this chapter undertakes a tour d’horizon that is divided into the four decades of Murdoch’s ‘Writing Life’. Each of her twenty –six novels is explored in terms of enduring thematic concerns, her ‘moral psychology’, changes and developments in style, and their critical reception in academia. Particular attention is paid to illuminating the ways in which Murdoch’s novels are being re-thought and revised in the twenty-first century.

Writing ‘A New Vocabulary of Experience’

This chapter side-lines Murdoch’s commitment to conventional realism to equate her well-documented love for nineteenth-century realist writing with a more esoteric enthusiasm for experimental European writing. It illustrates the ways in which she expands the novel form to maximise her novels’ emotional and moral impact, creating a fully synaesthetic style that she termed ‘a new vocabulary of experience’, inviting her readers to arrive at meaning not only through through the operation of logic, but also through an invasion of the senses. The chapter moves on to illustrate the variety of ways that Murdoch’s love of painting, colour, poetry, drama and music feeds into her idiosyncratic literary experimentation and concentrates on the more seductive, aesthetic aspects of her narratives that have been oddly neglected by generations of literary critics who commentate more exclusively on her indebtedness to conventional realism and direct equations between her philosophy and fiction.