ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch has been a significant figure of post-war British life, she is a recognizable ‘name’ and her career is ‘familiar to educated persons, like national folklore’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 570).1 She is perhaps best known as a novelist, publishing 26 novels between her first, Under the Net, in 1954, and her last, Jackson’s Dilemma, in 1995. As a novelist she has been critically acclaimed and her 1978 novel, The Sea, the Sea, won the Booker Prize. Without a doubt Murdoch is one of the most celebrated novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, and her novels are complex and challenging and, arguably, ‘of all the post-war English novelists she has the greatest intellectual range, the deepest rigour’ (ibid., p. 595).2 However, currently Murdoch is best known, not for her writing, but for the film about her life, simply titled, Iris, in which Kate Winslet played the ‘young Iris’ and Judy Dench the old. The film told the story of Murdoch’s life and notably of her death from Alzheimer’s and is based on her husband’s, John Bayley’s, portrayal of her life, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, which became a best-seller in its own right.3
