Iris Murdoch: A Life

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A full and revealing biography of one of the century's greatest English writers and an icon to a generation. Dame Iris Murdoch played a major role in English life and letters for nearly half a century. As a novelist, thinker, and private individual, her life holds 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 interact intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well known; hers was an adventurous, highly eventful life marked by phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. Iris's formative years were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured World War II. Her 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 that turbulent time and after. Peter Conradi was very close to both Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Iris's husband. This biography draws on vast resources in diaries, papers, and friends' recollections to offer an extraordinarily full account and a superlative history of a generation who profoundly influenced our world. 'Absolutely central to our culture.' — A.S. Byatt