Murdoch, Dame (Jean) Iris 1919-99
Irish novelist, playwright and philosopher

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents. She was educated at Badminton School, Bristol, and Oxford, where she was Fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne's College (1948-63). She married the literary critic John Bayley in 1956, and was made a DBE in 1987.

She published a study of Jean-Paul Sartre (who was, like her, both a novelist and a philosopher) in 1953 and two important but unfashionable philosophical works, much influenced by Plato, The Fire and the Sun (1977) and The Sovereignty of the Good (1970). These deal with the relationships between art and philosophy, and between love, freedom, knowledge and morality. A later philosophical work is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).

Her fiction, which was at first a secondary activity, is mostly concerned with the preoccupations of middle-class intellectuals and deals with the conflict of good and evil in the context of involved personal relationships, often attended by strange situations and incidents. The popularity of her work derives largely from her narrative skill in controlling tangled and shifting patterns of relationships, the ironic or even startling circumstances in which the characters find themselves, and the pervasive blend of realism and symbolism.

Bibliography: Her first novel, Under the Net, framed round a male narrator, appeared in 1954, and was followed by a further 26 titles in the next 45 years, including The Sandcastle (1957), about a schoolmaster's relationship with a young artist; The Bell (1958), about the consecration of a bell by a lay community; A Severed Head (1961), a black comedy; An Unofficial Rose (1962); The Red and the Green (1965); The Nice and the Good (1968); The Black Prince (1973); The Sea, The Sea (1978), about an obsession with a childhood sweetheart, which won the Booker Prize; Nuns and Soldiers (1980); The Good Apprentice (1985); The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), about a group of Oxford intellectuals; The Message to the Planet (1989); and The Green Knight (1993).

She also wrote several plays, including A Severed Head (adapted with J B Priestley from her novel in 1963); Servants and the Snow (1970); The Two Arrows (1972); and Art and Eros (1980); and a book of poetry, The Year of the Birds (1978).

One of the finest writers of her generation, she spent her final years suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Bibliography: D Johnson, Iris Murdoch (1987); A S Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (1965).