Iris Murdoch was a novelist and philosopher, whose novels included The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker prize. In her fiction and her philosophical works, she traversed the themes of good and evil, love and power, and the nature of morality.

She is recognised with a plaque at 29 Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington, where she had a flat for more than 25 years.

Early life

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on 15 July 1919, and soon after moved to live in London. She attended a Froebel school and then Badminton School, before winning a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied Classics from 1938.

Murdoch threw herself into life in Oxford, whether in her studies, her acting, her politics – she was a Communist until about the mid 1940s – or her relationships with both men and women. She became convinced that philosophy was central to how to live.

War work

On graduating with a first in 1942, Murdoch began work at the Treasury. She lived an intense, sociable, intellectual, bohemian life in London.

Murdoch wanted a ‘hands-on’ war role and in 1944 joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, going to Austria in 1945 to work with displaced people. Reading the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness made her want to get back to philosophy, and in 1947 she started postgraduate work in the subject at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Philosophy

Murdoch was more drawn to the existentialism of Sartre and the junction between philosophy and psychology than the Wittgensteinian approach that dominated Cambridge – and British – philosophy at the time. She saw personality, society and convention as elements in moral choice.

In 1948, Murdoch became a tutor at St Anne’s College, Oxford, teaching moral and political philosophy. Oxford at that time saw itself as the philosophical centre of the world and was dominated by analytical philosophy. Her friend and fellow Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot wrote, ‘We were interested in moral language, she was interested in the moral life.’

In 1963, Murdoch left St Anne’s to get more time to write fiction and to escape from a mutually obsessional attachment to a female colleague. But she did not give up philosophy.

Beyond academia

Murdoch developed her philosophical ideas outside institutional academia and in ways counter to current trends. Responding to the horrors of the Second World War, she argued that morality was not subjective or a matter of taste or simply a linguistic construct, as many of her contemporaries held, but an objective concept. Attention to other people was one of her key ideas – the attempt to see them clearly and honestly without being blinded by preconceptions, desire or fantasy.

Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good in 1970, a collection of three essays, defending the idea that ‘good’ exists as a necessary form of guidance for us in the world. In 1992 she published Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and in 1997 a collection of Murdoch’s philosophical articles, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, was published.

Fiction

Iris Murdoch had been a writer since childhood and published 26 novels, as well as poetry and plays. Under the Net was her first published novel (1954); at the time, it received mixed reviews, but it was selected in 2005 by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels of the 20th century.

When The Bell was published in 1958, the New Statesman called Murdoch ‘the foremost novelist of her generation’ while the Times Literary Supplement praised the novel’s rare conjunction of a ‘brilliant imagination and a passionate concern for conveying … moral concepts’. It was popular too: 30,000 hardback copies were printed in ten weeks.

Degrees of Freedom (1965) by AS Byatt provided an in-depth critical exploration of Murdoch’s first eight novels. The Black Prince (1973) took the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread prize (1974) and The Sea, The Sea (1978) the Booker. In 1976 Murdoch was named a CBE and in 1987 was made a dame.

Later life and death

Iris Murdoch married the Oxford don and literary critic John Bayley in 1956. Although Murdoch continued to have intense relationships outside the marriage, they were a devoted couple, eccentric in matters of housekeeping and dress.

Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the mid 1990s and died on 8 February 1999 in Oxford.

Plaque location

Murdoch is commemorated at 29 Cornwall Gardens, where she resided in Flat 5 for more than 25 years. She lived on the fourth (then the top) floor; there was no lift and the stairs left visitors gasping for breath on arrival.

Murdoch loved London and would usually spend three days a week in her London flat, Oxford being her other home. London was the setting or part-setting for 24 of her novels, and she referred to the capital as ‘another main character in my fiction’.