Born: July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland
Died: February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
Iris (Jean) Murdoch was a British writer and philosopher, born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at the University of Oxford. In 1948 she was appointed a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Oxford. Murdoch’s first published book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), is a study of French existentialism. Her other non-fiction works include Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals: Philosophical Reflections (1992).
Murdoch began a career as a successful writer of fiction with Under the Net (1954). A decade later, with Murdoch’s adaptation of her own novel A Severed Head (1961; play, written with British writer J. B. Priestley, 1963), she also became a dramatist. Her style is complex, combining naturalism and the macabre, the familiar and the magical. Regarded as a master stylist, she presents in her fiction a cast of characters who struggle with the discovery that they are not truly free but are fettered by themselves, society, and natural forces. Murdoch’s many novels include The Italian Girl (1964; play, written with James Saunders, 1967); A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); An Accidental Man (1972); The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974); The Sea, the Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize; The Good Apprentice (1986); The Green Knight (1994), a story incorporating many elements of and references to the 14th-century anonymous romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Jackson’s Dilemma (1996), a story set in 20th-century Britain but loosely based on the play Much Ado about Nothing by English playwright William Shakespeare.
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