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From The Times
January 5, 2008

Iris Murdoch

The 50 greatest postwar writers: 12

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Iris Murdoch (1919-99) was one of the most admired novelists of the Sixties and Seventies. Her novels evoked beautifully the atmosphere of the country gardens (The Bell, 1958) or the mysterious London streets (The Time of the Angels, 1968) in which they were set, with their characters engaged in intriguing love relationships, from the totally innocent to the wholly weird.

There was often a strange guru figure in the background (The Flight from the Enchanter, 1956), and there was always an implicit moral theme — the growth in the characters of self-knowledge and the understanding of other people, or their tragic failure to achieve this. Murdoch taught philosophy at Oxford and wrote Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She was appointed DBE in 1987. She suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and her husband, John Bayley, tenderly described the first and final years of their marriage in his memoir, Iris.

One to read: The Sea, The Sea (1978)

More about Iris Murdoch

News: Illness that sent Iris Murdoch tumbling into a sea of silence

News: Iris Murdoch's husband sells 1,000-book library

News: A poison pen in the Iris idyll

The Sunday Times review: Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her by A. N. Wilson

Bedding Miss Murdoch

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See the full top 50 list here

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