Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (/ˈmɜːrdɒk/ MUR-dok; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher.
[17] Dublin City Council and the Irish postal service marked the centenary of Murdoch's birth in 2019 by unveiling a commemorative plaque and postage stamp at her birthplace.
Martha Nussbaum has argued for Murdoch's "transformative impact on the discipline" of moral philosophy because she directed her analysis not at the once-dominant matters of will and choice, but at those of attention (how people learn to see and conceive of one another) and phenomenal experience (how the sensory "thinginess" of life shapes moral sensibility).
[20] Although first a student, and later a lecturer and scholar, of 20th century British analytic moral philosophy, Murdoch rejected most of what was characteristic of that tradition.
With the rise of anti-metaphysical empiricism in general, and logical positivism in particular, emotivists like A. J. Ayer and prescriptivists like R. M. Hare settled the good independently of active cognitive practices and therefore not something to be attained by them.
[24] Broackes also notes that Murdoch's influence on the discipline of philosophy was sometimes indirect since it impacted both her contemporaries and the following generation of philosophers, particularly Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, John McDowell, and Bernard Williams.
Her most central parable, which appears in The Sovereignty of Good, asks us (in Nussbaum's succinct account), "to imagine a mother-in-law, M, who has contempt for D, her daughter-in-law.
Since M is a self-controlled Englishwoman, she behaves (so Murdoch stipulates) with perfect graciousness all the while, and no hint of her real view surfaces in her acts.
Eventually M does not have to make such an effort to control her actions: they flow naturally from the way she has come to see D."[19] This is how M cultivates a pattern of behavior that leads her to view D "justly or lovingly".
[26]: 317 The parable is partly meant to show (against Oxford contemporaries including R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire) the importance of the "inner" life to moral action.
Her novels, in their attention and generosity to the inner lives of individuals, follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Proust, besides showing an abiding love of Shakespeare.
Her novels often include upper-middle-class male intellectuals caught in moral dilemmas, gay characters, refugees, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, empathetic pets, curiously "knowing" children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male "enchanter" who imposes his will on the other characters—a type of man Murdoch is said to have modelled on her lover, the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti.
[27] An authorised collection of her poetic writings, Poems by Iris Murdoch, appeared in 1997, edited by Paul Hullah and Yozo Muroya.
Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels An Unofficial Rose and The Bell.
In 1988 the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Murdoch its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of her life's work.
He stressed that some authors, "like Tolstoy, Trollope, Balzac and Dickens", wrote about people different from themselves by choice, whereas others, such as "James, Flaubert, Lawrence, Woolf", have more interest in the self.
[31] Murdoch won a scholarship to study at Vassar College in the US in 1946, but was refused a visa because she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938, while a student at Oxford.
In a 1990 Paris Review interview, she said that her membership of the Communist Party had made her see "how strong and how awful it [Marxism] is, certainly in its organized form".
[33]: 210 Aside from her Communist Party membership, her Irish heritage is the sensitive aspect of Murdoch's political life that has attracted interest.
Part of the interest revolves around the fact that, although Irish by both birth and traced descent on both sides, Murdoch did not display the full set of political opinions that are sometimes assumed to go with this origin.
[3]: 24 Conradi notes A. N. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in The Red and the Green, and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978.
Later, of Ian Paisley, Murdoch stated "[he] sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists.
Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's film Iris (2001), based on Bayley's memories of his wife as she developed Alzheimer's disease.
[41] In 2015, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an Iris Murdoch season, with several memoirs by people who knew her, and dramatisations of her novels:[42] In March 2019, the London-based production company Rebel Republic Films announced that it had optioned The Italian Girl, and was developing a screenplay based on the book.
[43] Novels Short Stories Philosophy Plays Poetry collections Source: Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Kingston University