The popular impression of Iris Murdoch is riddled with
contradictions. Her novels feature dark, irrational passions,
working themselves out in unexpected denouments. Her analytical
books on philosophy emphasize the importance of finding the right,
moral way to live. Her husband John Bayley's memoir of her as an
Alzheimer's sufferer showed them both as babes in the woods,
somehow able to preserve their innocence in a tainted world. The
triumph of this magisterial biography is that all these different
aspects are unified into a coherent view, In her youth, Iris was
vital and impulsive, sure of her powers of attraction, ready to
bond with a new partner soon after any relationship had ended - and
there were many. Like a character in one of her own novels, she was
drawn to erotic magnetism of a kind that today would be considered
dubious - a prime example being her affair with Noble Prize-winning
novelist Elias Canetti, an emotional tyrant and manipulator who
found it difficult to spend a whole night with a woman. Suddenly,
after meeting Oxford Eng. Lit. luminary John Bayley, Iris's life
seemed to be purified of such perversions - probably because she
loved him so much that she was happy to live by his code. This
biography is outstanding in its depth of research, command of
complicated evidence and portrayal of social context - the 1940s
are especially well done. After the early years of marriage to
Bayley, there is a tendency to rely too much on explicating the
fiction. The Alzheimer years are sensitively passed over. (Kirkus
UK)
Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A.S.Byatt notes, she is ‘absolutely central to our culture’. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognizable Murdoch world, and the adjective ‘Murdochian’ has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interract intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well-known; hers has been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. For Iris’s formative years, astonishingly, movingly and intimately documented by Conradi’s meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured the Second World War, and her life like her books was full of the most extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers,artists, writers and poets of that turbulent time and after.
Peter Conradi is very close to both Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Iris’s husband, whose memoir of their life together has itself been the subject of an enormous amount of attention and acclaim. This will be an extraordinarily full biography, for there are vast resources in diaries and papers and friends’ recollections, and while it will be a superlative biography it will also be a superb history of a generation whohave profoundly influenced our world today.
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