Book description
A full and revealing biography of one of the century's greatest English
writers and an icon to a generation.
Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter
for nearly half a century. As A. S.Byatt notes, she is 'absolutely
central to our culture'. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private
individual, her life has 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
interract intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally
fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well known; hers has
been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal
emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world
which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. For Iris's
formative years, astonishingly, movingly and intimately documented by
Conradi's meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and
British intellectuals who fought and endured World War II, and her life
like her books, was full of the most 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, whose memoir of their life together has itself been the
subject of an enormous amount of attention and acclaim. This will be an
extraordinarily full biography, for there are vast resources in diaries
and papers and friends' recollections, and while it is a superlative
biography it is also a superb history of a generation who have
profoundly influenced our world today. From 1997 Peter Conradi was
Professor Emeritus, Kingston University, and Honorary Research Fellow at
UCL; from 1999 he has been Visiting Research Fellow at Magdalen, Oxford.
His critical study, IRIS MURDOCH: THE SAINT AND THE ARTIST (Macmillan,
1986), was described by the NYTBR as 'Brilliant' and will be reissued by
HarperCollins.
