ABSTRACT
In a period of less than thirty years Iris Murdoch has published twenty-one novels, as well as three works of philosophy – Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of Good and The Fire and the Sun. Born in Dublin in 1919, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England. She was educated at Badminton School, Bristol, and took a degree in Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. Many readers have had the experience of feeling at once excited and exasperated by Murdoch’s fiction. The mixture of apparent bizarrerie, excogitation and anagogical implication is altogether too heady, they find, but they are none the less – albeit reluctantly – absorbed. For Iris Murdoch herself, writing fiction is a religious activity: ‘all art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.’ The art of the novelist may be mystification and fun, but it is equally truth-seeking and truth-revealing, she believes; it requires the novelist to make moral judgements.
