British · b. 1919
Iris Murdoch was an Irish-British novelist and philosopher, author of richly plotted novels of love, morality, and the comic and the uncanny, including the Booker-winning The Sea, the Sea.
Iris Murdoch was both a serious moral philosopher and a hugely productive novelist, and her fiction is animated by philosophical questions about goodness, love, freedom, and the nature of reality.
Across more than twenty-five novels — including The Bell, A Severed Head, The Black Prince, and The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978 — she combined intricate plots, charged relationships, and intellectual depth with a fascination for the uncanny and the comic. Her philosophical work, including The Sovereignty of Good, remains influential.
Murdoch is celebrated as one of the most intelligent and inventive British novelists of the twentieth century.
by Iris Murdoch
Bradley Pearson, failed writer of 58, falls violently in love with Julian Baffin — the 20-year-old daughter of his rival Arnold. The love is absurd, overwhelming, and destroys everything. Murdoch's most formally adventurous novel includes multiple unreliable forewords and postscripts that reframe the entire narrative.
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by Iris Murdoch
Charles Arrowby, retired theatre director, retreats to a house on the English coast to write his memoirs and renounce the world. He then discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, lives nearby — and becomes obsessed with rescuing her from her marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize winner is a novel about the self-deceptions of obsessive love.
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