Iris Murdoch
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product 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 the Publisher
A full and revealing biography of one of the century’s greatest English writers and an icon to a generation.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book transformed my idea of Iris Murdoch, in whom I had not previously shown much interest, and made me regret that I had paid so little attention to her when she was alive.
It was interesting to me because I am interested in philosophy, don't mind a lot of exposure (occasionally) to what the Oxbridge elite are up to, am quite interested by the philosopher/novelist combination, and despite those dusty credentials, not at all put of by a colourful love life.
My impression, somewhat tendentiously perhaps, is of a woman who dedicated her whole life to her career as a novelist (her philosophy was I feel a junior but integral partner), to an extent which I had not imagined possible.
Not because she slaved away at it 24/7, but because I got the impression that the very rich and interesting social and sexual side of her life was all research for her novels (not specific but general background).
She was emotionally promiscuous, falling in love with a startling number of people, which is much more interesting than mere sexual promiscuity, and love perhaps was the central theme of her fiction.
Philosophically, one of her central themes was morality, the good.
One thing this book did not do for me (nor any other) was give me any comprehension of her conception of the good which was consistent with her life, her novels, and her philosophical writings.
She remains to me an enigma, which will probably never be dispelled (as to her philosophical views).
I do not write book reviews (does it show?), this is my third book review at amazon.
I do it only for books which have had real impact upon me, and this was one of them.
And I enjoyed reading it too.
It was interesting to me because I am interested in philosophy, don't mind a lot of exposure (occasionally) to what the Oxbridge elite are up to, am quite interested by the philosopher/novelist combination, and despite those dusty credentials, not at all put of by a colourful love life.
My impression, somewhat tendentiously perhaps, is of a woman who dedicated her whole life to her career as a novelist (her philosophy was I feel a junior but integral partner), to an extent which I had not imagined possible.
Not because she slaved away at it 24/7, but because I got the impression that the very rich and interesting social and sexual side of her life was all research for her novels (not specific but general background).
She was emotionally promiscuous, falling in love with a startling number of people, which is much more interesting than mere sexual promiscuity, and love perhaps was the central theme of her fiction.
Philosophically, one of her central themes was morality, the good.
One thing this book did not do for me (nor any other) was give me any comprehension of her conception of the good which was consistent with her life, her novels, and her philosophical writings.
She remains to me an enigma, which will probably never be dispelled (as to her philosophical views).
I do not write book reviews (does it show?), this is my third book review at amazon.
I do it only for books which have had real impact upon me, and this was one of them.
And I enjoyed reading it too.
Format:Paperback
An impressively researched and very well-written account of the life of one of 20th-century Britain's most prolific novelists, who was also, at various times, a Communist, a civil servant, a philosophy don, a teacher of philosophy in an art college, and the lover of many learned men, including the polymath Franz Baerman Steiner and the writer Elias Canetti. Conradi, a close friend of Murdoch, describes the various periods of Murdoch's life and the people she associated with very vividly, in dense, at times almost poetic language, with many interesting quotes from Murdoch's own diaries and her friends' accounts of her. Her childhood in London (daughter of Irish parents who moved to London and lived a very quiet life), schooling at Badminton under a Quaker headmistress who remained a close friend, wild days in Oxford acting, working furiously, making many friends, and falling in love with tutors Eduard Frankel, Donald Mackinnon and with fellow student Frank Thompson, her experiences in wartime London and her life as an Oxford don and - after Franz Steiner's death - as a member of Canetti's Jewish-emigre Hampstead circle, are beautifully brought to life. Conradi manages a vast cast of characters very well, so that the book at times is almost like a combination of a vast novel and a cultural history of 20th-century London and Oxford. In the second half of the book, following Iris Murdoch's marriage to don and critic John Bayley, Conradi begins concentrating more on Murdoch's novels (she began comparatively late as a novelist, in her 30s, and married Bayley just before beginning her fourth novel, 'The Bell'). There's plenty of interesting information on the books, and some fascinating links between Murdoch's plots and her real life - one very good thing about the biography is that it makes you want to read more Iris Murdoch. Although (the reverse of A.N. Wilson in his rather scurrilous book) Conradi can sometimes let his personal fondness for Murdoch affect his prose so that she seems almost saintlike, particularly in the later part of her life - and he plays down rather the appalling squalor in which she and Bayley lived, and her heavy drinking which had a rather dire effect on her striking good looks in later life - I think he probably presents the most balanced picture of her that we have in terms of a biography. And the Alzheimers is (mercifully) only discussed briefly at the end - the real tragedy of Richard Eyre's in some ways very good film 'Iris' was that Iris Murdoch became thought of as 'Alzheimer's Lady' rather than as an important writer. Conradi firmly states her position as a thoroughly interesting novelist and thinker of the 20th century - for that, if for nothing else, this biography should be highly acclaimed.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
