Iris Murdoch

15 July 1919 - 08 February 1999

Standard Name: Murdoch, Iris

Birth Name: Jean Iris Murdoch

Married Name: Jean Iris Bailey

IM , active from the second world war till almost the end of the twentieth century, was best known as a philosophical novelist with a wild sense of comedy. Her twenty-six novels foreground philosophic issues similar to those discussed in her well-regarded academic publications. She contributed to many periodicals, and wrote plays for stage and radio, an opera libretto, and poetry.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Literary responses	Ada Leverson	The reviewer for British Book News felt that the appeal of AL 's works lay in the grace of their prose, the wit of their dialogue, and the rich elegance of their period [Edwardian] setting...
Literary responses	Marina Warner	Critics admired the novel for its skilled use of plot, characterisation, and lyrical descriptions. Some compared MW to Iris Murdoch . Moseley, Merritt, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 194. Gale Research, 1998. 194: 284
Occupation	Elizabeth Jane Howard	In winter 1953 EJH , aged about thirty, became an editor at Chatto and Windus , which was then run by Norah Smallwood and Ian Parsons . She read submitted manuscripts, wrote reports on them...
Occupation	Rebecca West	The prize went to P. H. Newby 's Something to Answer For, which according to Kermode years later was a compromise decision. Dame Rebecca didn't dislike it as much as nearly all the others...
Performance of text	T. S. Eliot	Before this female roles were taken by faculty wives or professional actresses. Iris Murdoch played the Leader of the Chorus in this production.
politics	Marghanita Laski	On 30 October 1958 ML was one of the signatories to a letter to the editor of theTimes urging the government to cease testing nuclear weapons; others who signed included Peggy Ashcroft , Storm Jameson
Publishing	Shena Mackay	Before Babies in Rhinestones appeared, SM completed a novel entitled A Bowl of Cherries, which reuses some parts of her unpublished The Firefly Motel. She submitted this, her first novel for over a...
Reception	Kathleen Raine	KR declined the invitation of the Royal Society of Literature to become a Companion of Literature, saying the companionship had been cheapened by its award to the journalistsIris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess . Watts, Janet. “Kathleen Raine”. The Guardian, 8 July 2003, p. 25. 25
Reception	Kathleen Raine	Iris Murdoch bought this book as a present for her mentor Donald MacKinnon . Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins, 2002. 258
Reception	Anita Brookner	Among other evaluations, Olga Kenyon admired AB 's capacity to represent the interiority and social frustrations of gifted undervalued women: qtd. in Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan, 1992. 2 women with twentieth-century awareness of their problems, which however are problems unchanged since...
Reception	Barbara Pym	Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception	Mary Wesley	James Hale , who had liked her first novel, said that this one stepped forward, in literary terns, roughly a mile from there. I haven't enjoyed reading a novel so much in years. Its line...
Reception	Enid Bagnold	EB was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1970, and awarded a CBE in 1976, at the same time as Iris Murdoch . Berney, Kathryn A., editor. Contemporary Women Dramatists. St. James Press, 1994. 10
Textual Features	Caroline Blackwood	Critic Val Warner called CB a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction. Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2024, Numerous volumes. 65: 38 A press handout on Nancy Schoenberger 's biography likens Blackwood's work to that of Edna O'Brien , Muriel Spark , Iris Murdoch
Textual Features	A. S. Byatt	This discusses Murdoch's first eight novels. An enlarged Vintage paperback reprint of about thirty years later, entitled Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, adds ASB 's later writings on Murdoch: essays...

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