Synopses & Reviews
Iris Murdoch's life like her books was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers, and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, "it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters," and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself "must not distinguish between me and my work."
She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation; but much that was thought to be romance in her work turns out to be reality. "Real life is so much odder than any book," she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylized comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted.
Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960s, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distance and by letter, and the Buddhist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity.
Review
"For many people Iris Murdoch is best known as a novelist. But a lucky few know it is her non-fictional works, especially her Platonic philosophical essays, which serve as the spinal cord of her thought, and the luminescent core of her gift to the world. For these people the appearance of a biography is cause for both excitement and anxiety, because the value of learning more about her life and the origins of her thought is counterbalanced by the anxiety that she will become a more generally known commodity and perhaps suffer the obscure disvaluing that comes with popularity. Happily for us, this biography satisfies the hope while quieting the anxiety, for it is written by a true lover of Murdoch's thought—one whose criteria match rather well those of her aficionados. This results in a biography which is not ponderous, yet remains too microscopically detailed for those seeking an entry into her world. Much of the book is dedicated to the years up until 1947—when she re-entered her academic career in Cambridge and then (from 1948) in Oxford—and it elegantly but not obtrusively discusses Murdoch's rather exerting love life, provoking thought but not titillation. Conradi is extremely good on the influences that went into Murdoch's development, and he alludes to various heretofore hidden wondrous treasures—such as noting that Murdoch wrote a book on Heidegger in the 1980"s and 90"s, which she decided not to publish. Most basically, he has a gift for being intimate with Murdoch while yet seeing her wholly in truth—confirming one of her most persistent insistences, namely that in seeing the world in love, we see the world aright. A generous and honest biography, one much as Murdoch deserves." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"It has been nearly two years since Iris Murdoch's death from Alzheimer's and the publication of her husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris. It seems fitting that the beloved philosopher and novelist should be the subject of a biography nearly as idiosyncratic and charming as she herself was. One of the numerous oddities of this one is its construction: each chapter is broken into numbered sections rarely more than four pages long. This allows the author (Murdoch's longtime friend and biographer of Angus Wilson) to ramble back and forth chronologically, examining a few years at a time through different perspectives literary, romantic, philosophical and gradually progress forward. The overall effect is leisurely, informal, highly literary, and more than a bit uneven....The book's great strength lies in its characterizations....Documenting Murdoch's eccentricities and legendary kindnesses, Conradi succeeds in reviving her presence. Thus, readers who seek a few last glimpses of Murdoch's rare personality will be gratified by this affectionate, if disorganized, tribute; those looking for closure or hoping to make sense of the narrative of her life will not." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Novelist and philosopher Murdoch's final years, dimmed by Alzheimer's, were lovingly, daringly chronicled by her husband, John Bayley, in deeply personal testimony that makes Conradi's fluidly interpretational biography all the more welcome for its broader view....Steeped in Murdoch's numerous diaries, novels (26), and philosophical writings, Conradi conveys with great aplomb her remarkable magnetism, kindness, genius, and sense of wonder, making palpable the sense that she was, as many attest, a magical being....Conradi's infectious fascination with Murdoch and stirring insights into her work make this a superb cornerstone biography." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Conradi...presents a richly textured study of [Murdoch's] personal, professional, academic, and literary life....Conradi offers sensual and intellectual details about every aspect of his subject, including her developing sense of both self and the absoluteness of Kant's moral imperative. Rich footnoting leads the reader to expansions on the narrative as well as to the authority behind the biographer's statements. Scholars need this text, but it will also intrigue lay readers, especially those who enjoyed John Bayley's Elegy for Iris." Library Journal
Review
"Fun stuff. The emphasis, properly, is on her work." Washington Post Book World
Review
"A long but selective biography that focuses on the distinguished British novelist as an expert on love, emphasizing her many affairs and intense friendships....Conradi deftly weaves throughout the text an account of Murdoch's political activism, including her complicated views on Ireland. The author loses steam a bit in the second half, when he introduces her future husband, literary critic John Bayley....Conradi discusses Murdoch's fiction best in terms of the relationships that influence it. And he leaves out a lot....Given the fact that the author is Murdoch's literary executor...it's not too surprising that no one has a bad word for her, with the exception of one former lover, novelist Elias Canetti. It's also true that, as Murdoch herself admitted, very few people really know her. Conradi could well be one of them. Illuminating, but as the author himself suggests, it's the beginning of the discussion about Murdoch's life, not the end." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"How is moral philosophy related to narrative fiction? One would think that the relationship ought to be an intimate one. Both genres are concerned with character and choice, with motives and imaginings, with the vicissitudes of passion. And yet, from the time when Plato attacked the tragic artists, the relationship has often been characterized by mutual suspicion, philosophers viewing narrative literature as indulgent, emotional, and lacking in normative clarity, writers of fiction viewing philosophers as intolerant moralists who lack appreciation of what Proust calls the "intermittences of the heart." But some cultures and some periods have been marked by especially hostile relations between the camps. In the latter half of the twentieth century, fiction and philosophy drew close in France, with Sartre and Camus writing both kinds of books and blurring the distinction. In the English-speaking world, by contrast, things were very different. Very few noted philosophers attempted fiction, and Iris Murdoch was the only eminent novelist to publish serious works of moral philosophy...." Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
About the Author
Peter Conradi is the author of the biographies Angus Wilson and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is the literary executor of the Murdoch estate.