Picture of author.

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)

Teoksen Meri, meri : romaani tekijä

86+ teosta 26,182 jäsentä 564 arvostelua 138 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

Iris Murdoch was one of the twentieth century's most prominent novelists, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea. She died in 1999. (Publisher Provided) Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 15, 1919. She was educated at Badminton School in Bristol and Oxford University, where she read näytä lisää classics, ancient history, and philosophy. After several government jobs, she returned to academic life, studying philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948, she became a fellow and tutor at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She also taught at the Royal College of Art in London. A professional philosopher, she began writing novels as a hobby, but quickly established herself as a genuine literary talent. She wrote over 25 novels during her lifetime including Under the Net, A Severed Head, The Unicorn, and Of the Nice and the Good. She won several awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince in 1973 and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978. She died on February 8, 1999 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Image credit: © Steve Pyke 1990 (use of image requires permission from Steve Pyke)

Tekijän teokset

Meri, meri : romaani (1978) 3,581 kappaletta
Under the Net (1954) 2,134 kappaletta
Kello (1958) 2,035 kappaletta
A Severed Head (1961) 1,533 kappaletta
The Black Prince (1973) 1,497 kappaletta
Yksisarvinen (1963) 940 kappaletta
The Nice and the Good (1968) 900 kappaletta
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) 824 kappaletta
The Green Knight (1993) 810 kappaletta
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) 728 kappaletta
Hyvä oppilas (1985) 712 kappaletta
HIEKKALINNA (1957) 692 kappaletta
The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) 648 kappaletta
A Word Child (1975) 635 kappaletta
Italialaistyttö (1964) 635 kappaletta
The Red and the Green (1965) 539 kappaletta
The Sovereignty of Good (1970) 536 kappaletta
Nuns and Soldiers (1980) 531 kappaletta
Bruno's Dream (1969) 523 kappaletta
The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) 511 kappaletta
The Message to the Planet (1989) 487 kappaletta
Epävirallinen ruusu (1962) 487 kappaletta
Henry and Cato (1976) 475 kappaletta
Jackson's Dilemma (1995) 467 kappaletta
An Accidental Man (1971) 466 kappaletta
Enkelten aika (1966) 381 kappaletta
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) 237 kappaletta
Something Special: A Story (1957) 160 kappaletta
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986) 143 kappaletta
Iris Murdoch: The Essential Guide (2004) 13 kappaletta
A year of birds : poems (1978) 8 kappaletta
O Sino 4 kappaletta
Canterburyjske priče 4 kappaletta
Die Souveränität des Guten (2023) 3 kappaletta
Unicórnio 1 kappale
Henry e Cato 1 kappale
İTALYAN KIZI 1 kappale
The Nature of Metaphysics (1960) 1 kappale
Hver tar sin 1 kappale
Against Dryness 1 kappale
Çan 1 kappale

Associated Works

The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999) — Avustaja — 153 kappaletta
Virtue Ethics (1997) — Avustaja — 130 kappaletta
Granta 111: Going Back (2010) — Avustaja — 113 kappaletta
Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (2011) — Avustaja — 12 kappaletta
Plato on Art and Beauty (Philosophers in Depth) (2012) — Avustaja — 4 kappaletta
Plays of the Sixties, Volume 2 (1967) — Avustaja — 3 kappaletta
O'r pedwar gwynt, Gaeaf 2019 (2019) — Avustaja — 1 kappale

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Virallinen nimi
Murdoch, Jean Iris
Muut nimet
Murdoch, Jean Iris
Syntymäaika
1919-07-15
Kuolinaika
1999-02-08
Hautapaikka
Ashes scattered in the garden of Oxford Crematorium
Sukupuoli
female
Kansalaisuus
Ierland
Syntymäpaikka
Dublin, Ireland
Kuolinpaikka
Oxfordshire, England, UK
Kuolinsyy
Alzheimer's disease
Asuinpaikat
Dublin, Ierland
Oxford, Engeland
Koulutus
Somerville College, Oxford
Ammatit
novelist
philosopher
Suhteet
Bayley, John (husband)
Organisaatiot
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary, Literature | 1975)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Foreign Honorary Member | 1982)
St Anne's College, Oxford University
Palkinnot ja kunnianosoitukset
Booker Prize (1978)
Agentti
Ed Victor
Lyhyt elämäkerta
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, the only child of an Anglo-Irish family. When she was a baby, the family moved to London, where her father worked as a civil servant. She attended the Badminton School as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938, she enrolled at Oxford University, where she read Classics. She graduated with a First Class Honors degree in 1942 and got a job with the Treasury. In 1944, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working in Brussels, Innsbruck, and Graz for two years. She then returned to her studies and became a postgraduate at Cambridge University. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. In 1956, she married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and English professor at Oxford. She published her debut novel, Under the Net, in 1954 and went on to produce 25 more novels and additional acclaimed works of philosophy, poetry and drama. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and named a Dame Commander of Order of the British Empire in 1987. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died two years later.

Jäseniä

Keskustelut

Group Read, June 2022: The Sea, the Sea, 1001 Books to read before you die (heinäkuu 2022)
Group Read, July 2018: Under The Net, 1001 Books to read before you die (heinäkuu 2018)
The Bell, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2018)
Musing on Murdoch in General, Iris Murdoch readers (lokakuuta 2017)
The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2017)
The Italian Girl, Iris Murdoch readers (marraskuu 2015)
The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch readers (syyskuu 2015)
The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch readers (tammikuu 2015)
The Green Knight, Iris Murdoch readers (toukokuu 2014)
The Unicorn, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2014)
***Group Read, October 2013: The Bell by Iris Murdoch, 1001 Books to read before you die (lokakuuta 2013)
The Book and the Brotherhood, Iris Murdoch readers (lokakuuta 2013)
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch readers (toukokuu 2013)
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch readers (toukokuu 2013)
The Philosopher's Pupil, Iris Murdoch readers (huhtikuu 2013)
The Good Apprentice, Iris Murdoch readers (maaliskuu 2013)
Something Special, Iris Murdoch readers (maaliskuu 2013)
Henry and Cato, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2013)
A Word Child, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2013)
Bruno's Dream, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2013)
An Unofficial Rose, Iris Murdoch readers (helmikuu 2013)
Henry Cato, Iris Murdoch readers (tammikuu 2013)
Murdoch & Mayhem, 75 Books Challenge for 2012 (joulukuu 2012)

Kirja-arvosteluja

One of the queerest, most manic, most wonderful books I have read in a long time.

Iris Murdoch's debut novel is a disconcerting, shabby picaresque novel following the young hack writer Jake Donahue through a series of adventures. For the most part, it falls into my particular favourite type of picaresque: the adventure novel largely set over a few days. Murdoch is already comfortably inhabiting the body of a downtrodden, almost-broken, deeply strange protagonist, whose voice we can never entirely trust (Jake is keen to narrate his own story - a little too keen), and whose world seems to be a series of set-pieces that emerge out of otherwise ordinary life.

What is the plot? This is the kind of novel where certain literary snobs would say "the plot doesn't matter" but, reader, do not listen to them. In this case, the plot is precisely point. In a nutshell: Jake is kicked out by a woman, goes fawning back to two actress sisters from his past, uncovers a potential conspiracy involving a screenplay secretly adapted from a translation of a French novel he wrote some time ago, goes on a mad pub crawl with his gadabout mates, steals a film star dog who subsequently saves him from a police raid in the aftermath of a socialist party riot amidst an Ancient Roman film set in the middle of London, is mistaken for an escaped mental patient by an alley full of suburban gossips, pursues his lady love through Paris on Bastille Day, takes an unexpected job as a hospital orderly where his doubts and concerns come back to haunt him during a daring midnight visit to an incapacitated friend, and must consider whether he will position himself high(brow) or low on the unsteady rope ladder that is a literary career - or whether he even has the chops to climb the ladder at all. Throw in some Plato and a dash of Wittgenstein, a starling invasion straight out of Hitchcock's The Birds, and an avant-garde mime theatre, and you have Under the Net.

Murdoch's novel, first published in 1957, seems to sit quite comfortably within the (poorly named) 'Angry Young Man' cultural epoch - although Jake is not so much a victim of society as a personal exploration of those who exist comfortably in the margins. He has never held a job aside from writing until he signs up as an orderly, and is impressed by how easily he gets this one given how much his friends complain about the process. ("You will point out, and quite rightly", Jake says in one of Murdoch's moments of wry hilarity, that hospital orderly is perhaps a job where supply eclipses demand, "whereas what my friends were finding it so difficult to become was higher civil servants, columnists of the London dailies, officials of the British Council, fellows of colleges, or governors of the BBC. That is true.") Whereas her fellow novelists were interested in the temporal, Murdoch constantly allows us to see the metaphysical moments, the sublime and the ridiculous. But she is not writing, contrary to the philosophers who want to claim this text as their own, about what lies beyond the plot; Murdoch is finding the sublime within what is taking place, within human interaction and yearning.

And there is so much yearning. Although we have reason to doubt some of Jake's suspicions very early, he is a man easily compelled to new feeling: sudden love, sudden self-doubt, convinced he has destroyed a friendship or is under attack from the slightest of impulses. He is a fascinating character and, while I might concede that I'm not sure Murdoch entirely captures what it is like to be a male, the fulcrum around which her fairytale-like world rotates. (On a more terrestrial note, how times have changed - Jake tells us on the first page that his friend-cum-assistant Finn usually waits for him in bed, and later spends much of the book deeply pining for an old friend named Hugo. I had to separate myself entirely from 2020 to see these as the perfectly normal actions of a sensitive and impoverished heterosexual man!)

It is clear that one of my great projects for the 2020s will be to read all twenty-six of Murdoch's novels in order. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the pitch-perfect Samuel West, and I heartily recommend it for the way that West teases out both the uproarious comedy and the more delicate variety, yet I found myself returning to my copy of the book often to reread paragraphs or phrases just to let the author wash over me. I suspect that, structurally, or literarily, Under the Net is not one of Murdoch's greatest novels. (As her debut, it hardly could be!) But clearly from the Top 100 lists it frequently appears on, the novel has a place in the heart of many writers, and is perhaps an easier access point to her oeuvre than most.

Such fun.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
therebelprince | 50 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 21, 2024 |
Another Iris Murdoch book, with many of the usual themes - a curious collection of people fall in and out of love and get into some unlikely situations. There is a lot of hand-wringing about religion and loss of faith, as well as about an unexpected inheritance and the characters are on the whole quite an endearing bunch.
½
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
AlisonSakai | 6 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 21, 2024 |
There is something about Iris Murdoch's novels that haunts me in a rather profound way. It has to do with being British. At the time of writing this, it has been 196 years since my ancestors left South West England to push out to Australia, and this sense of separation from the motherland is a strange, raspberry-coloured strain of my personality. I am not English, but I relate to that culture more than to any other (aside from my own Australian one). So when I read "The Bell", sixty years after its publication, I am struck by how familiar and yet eerily unfamiliar everyone feels. I understand what is being said, and what the characters are feeling, but at the same time I really, really don't. What I mean is - it's not just time. When I read Australian novels from the 1950s, I get the characters in a way that I don't entirely get these ones. Most people are thicketed by their culture (to use a Murdochian word) to the extent that it bursts out of them without realising it. Turns of phrase, implications of word choice, what we see and hear and what we feel.

All of which is to say that Murdoch's novels might be more descriptive than I would like in the twentieth century (very Zola), her characters prone to outbursts with origins I can't fully comprehend, and her sense of plot sometimes grinding mercilessly over her forever maudlin figures, trapped in an aspic-like web of memory (in How Fiction Works, James Wood paints Murdoch as a "poignant figure" because - as she herself admitted - she could never create fully psychologically independent characters, like Shakespeare could, but instead despite her best efforts, her characters were in some ways extensions of herself), but what distances me from the novel most is a sense that I'm not quite with the characters in this lay religious community.

In spite of all this, it might actually be impossible to get bored during a Murdoch novel. She weaves around you. She might be - as Wood argues - rehashing nineteenth-century styles and ideas with a twentieth-century melodrama facade, but I still think she's pretty damn good, and I'm haunted by that bell. As I wrote in my rather underwhelmed review of The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch was prolific, one of the last survivors of an age when "literary" writers could churn out stories without undue pressure that every work had to be a masterpiece. I don't actually expect every book to be a masterpiece, and I would much rather we return to a mentality when we can just enjoy works, great or minor, as stories.

Which is a needlessly lengthy way of saying that I enjoyed the book, I didn't love the book, I'm intrigued by Murdoch's characters, I'm disconnected from her characters, I'm haunted by that bell, and I also think that people whose lives are so fixated on a church bell need to consider other avenues of intellectual stimulation. That's clear, right?
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
therebelprince | 48 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 21, 2024 |
Iris Murdoch was a true 20th century great.

From a 1975 review published in Kirkus:
"There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch's plots: it's not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man's wife--an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar's second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne's death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity--in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary's compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered."… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
therebelprince | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 21, 2024 |

Listat

1970s (1)
1950s (1)

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Associated Authors

Peter J. Conradi Introduction
Georges Magnane Translator
George Steiner Introduction
Sarah Churchwell Introduction
Harri Peccinotti Cover photograph, Cover designer, Cover artist, , Cover photographer
Clara Eggink Translator
Derek Jacobi Narrator
Simon Vance Narrator
Norman Barrs Narrator
John Burnside Introduction
Mary Kinzie Introduction
Daisy Johnson Introduction
John Sutherland Introduction
Tatsuro Kiuchi Illustrator
John Cole Cover photograph
Raymond Hawkey Cover designer
Simon Prebble Narrator
Ilse Krämer Translator
A.S. Byatt Introduction
Charles Raymond Cover artist
H. W. J. Schaap Translator
Martha Nussbaum Introduction
Stephen Medcalf Introduction
Fred Marcellino Cover artist
Heleen ten Holt Translator
Ronald Hawkey Cover designer
Elaine Feinstein Introduction
Declan Kiberd Introduction
Mary Midgley Foreword
James Brockway Contributor
Robin Sachs Narrator
Van Pariser Cover photograph
Egle Costantino Translator
Luisa Muraro Introduction
Monica Fiorini Translator
Michael McCurdy Illustrator

Tilastot

Teokset
86
Also by
10
Jäseniä
26,182
Suosituimmuussija
#799
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.7
Kirja-arvosteluja
564
ISBN:t
692
Kielet
25
Kuinka monen suosikki
138

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