Iris Murdoch: A Life - The Authorized Biography

London: HarperCollins, 2001 0002571234. Hardback. First Edition. First Printing. Fine/Fine. Like new. Collectible. DW is not price-clipped. No inscriptions or annotations. 706 pages plus many extra pages of B/W plates. (736 pages in all.) Detailed index. Conradi's book was well received. John Updike commented: "There would be no need to complain of literary biographies [...] if they were all as good." Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letters 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 recognizable 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 the Second World War, 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. A full and revealing biography of one of the century’s greatest English writers and an icon to a generation."In Iris: A Memoir, Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, charted in tender if often terrifying detail the writer and philosopher's final years battling against Alzheimer's Disease. Rather than duplicate Bayley, Peter Conradi's extensive and scholarly biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, wisely devotes the majority of its attention to exploring Murdoch's formative years. Conradi, a close friend whose dog was immortalised in one of Murdoch's novels, occasionally gets bogged down in minutiae... On the whole though his painstaking attention to detail pays immense dividends; reminding us of the sheer inventiveness of Murdoch's work revealing that her life was if anything "more improbably packed with strange coincidences than her plots". Born into an unorthodox Irish Protestant family, she never lost her sense of being an outsider in England -- a theme meditated upon in several of her finest novels. At Oxford University just before the Second World War she was a dedicated member of the Communist Party and an avowed bohemian. Stalin and a wartime spell in the civil service dimmed her commitment to Communism (in the 1980s she even voted Conservative) but she always remained a "free spirit". One former lover described her as being "monumentally unfaithful" and throughout her adult life she conducted numerous affairs with men and women. If her fictions sometimes presented interrelations of almost Shakespearean complexity, Murdoch's own trysts with Nobel Prizewinner Elias Canetti, the novelist Brigid Brophy and the philosopher Philippa Foot were no less dramatic. Later she praised monogamy, attacking the very promiscuity of her youth. Conradi acknowledges rather than condemns Murdoch's contradictions, presenting us with a fallible, mercurial human being -- the inspiring college lecturer who was sometimes too wrapped up in her own problems to teach; the advocate of tolerance who could be censorious; the existentialist who questioned freedom as a value in morals and the novelist who sought critical approval and yet was nauseated by praise" --Travis Elborough. .