'It is generally a sign of health and stature when a writer is
attacked simultaneously for wholly opposite reasons,' writes Peter
Conradi as he tries to shed some light on the motivations behind
some of Iris Murdoch's most complex fiction. Taking the approach
that a writer is best understood through her body of work, he
provides some background information about her life which he
juxtaposes against the motivations of the characters she created.
Conradi shows her torn between the artistic imperatives of her
fiction and the contrary drives that informed her literary
criticism and her work as a lecturer in philosophy. By analysing
both the artist (in the earlier part of the book) and her work he
creates the picture of a writer who, though driven to achieve a
body of work that would conform to her own teachings about the
intentions of works of fiction, nevertheless seemed incapable of
reigning in her own creative impulses. Engrossing and revealing in
equal terms, Conradi's work removes some of the veils obscuring
Murdoch's fiction and forces the reader to examine it in a fresh
light. Murdoch herself did not believe that fiction was capable of
saying anything so profound as to make a difference to the way we
live. Conradi, however, shows that labouring as she did, torn
between the contrary desires to be a writer and a critic, she
managed to create work which nearly succeeds in doing just that.
(Kirkus UK)
Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including 'The Bell, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Black Prince' and the Booker Prize-winning 'The Sea, The Sea.' In 'The Saint and the Artist,' the only full critical examination of Murdoch's work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainment and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.
This new edition, fully revised and updated, is issued to coincide with Peter Conradi's authorised biography Iris Murdoch.
"Brilliant"
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"[This] excellent and distinguished book had considerable influence on my own thinking."
MALCOLM BRADBURY
"In my view, the best work on her novels and thought now in print. [Conradi] reads her novels both wisely and attentively, ranges widely round them; his study of her Platonism is both just and rigorous."
A.S. BYATT (1990)
"Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable novelists and thinkers."
John Bayley
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