Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (born July 15, 1919 in Dublin , † February 8, 1999 in Oxford ) was an Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher . She is known for her non-fiction books and novels dealing with ethical or erotic-sexual subjects. Murdoch was one of the masterminds of the gender discussion and described himself as a person “in the skin of a homosexual man who cheats on his wife”.

Life

Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, near Dublin, in 1919, the only child of a British civil servant and an Irish singer . When she was only a few weeks old, the family moved to London. Iris was sent to private schools: in 1925 to the Froebel Demonstration School in Roehampton in the London Borough of Wandsworth , from 1932 to the Badminton School in Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol.

Murdoch studied classical and ancient history, philology and philosophy at Somerville College of Oxford University . At Newnham College of Cambridge University she earned her doctorate at Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy. In 1948 she became a fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford University. During the war she worked in the London Treasury and then in Austria in the field of refugee aid.

She wrote her first novel Unter dem Netz (English: Under the Net ) in 1954 , after she had previously published philosophical treatises, including the first English-language study on Jean-Paul Sartre . She met her future husband John Bayley (1925-2015) in Oxford in 1956 , a professor of English literature and also a writer. She then wrote another 25 novels, philosophical texts, and dramas until 1995, when the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease set in, which she initially believed to be writer's block.

Murdoch in 1978 received the Booker Prize for The sea, the sea (Engl .: The Sea, the Sea ), an extremely detailed novel about the power of love and loss: A former theater director is overwhelmed by jealousy when he his former love meets again after several decades. In 1975 she was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1982 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1987 she was named "Dame Commander" (DBE) of the Order of the British Empire , primarily for her commitment during the war years. The University of Cambridge awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1993 .

Iris Murdoch had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain since studying at Oxford .

Create

Murdoch was strongly influenced by Plato , Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre . Her novels are alternately haunting and grotesque, full of black humor and surprising twists; they go under the civilized surface of the "upper-middle-class" milieu to which their characters usually belong. Atypical gay people often feature in her work, most notably in The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970). She also wrote often about a powerful and almost demonic male "wizard" who imposes his will on other characters - a type of man Murdoch allegedly modeled after her lover, Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti .

Although she wrote predominantly in a realistic style, she occasionally wove ambiguity into her work through the misleading use of symbols and the use of fantasy elements in her precisely descriptive scenes.

Das Einhorn ( The Unicorn , 1963) can be understood as a sophisticated horror romance or as a novel with horror elements or perhaps as a brilliant parody of the horror novel . The Black Prince ( The Black Prince , 1973) is a remarkable study of erotic obsession. This text becomes more complicated and suggested different interpretations by the fact that some subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious "editor" of the book in a series of afterwords.

Some of her works have been made into films for television, such as the British television series based on her novels An Unofficial Rose and The Bell . John Boynton Priestley adapted her 1961 novel A Severed Head for the stage, which premiered in 1971 by Richard Attenborough with actor Ian Holm .

Murdoch is the protagonist of Richard Eyre's award-winning but controversial biography Iris from 2001. It tells the story of her decline from Alzheimer's disease through the perspective of her husband, John Bayley, when the couple lived in North Oxford. Murdoch was portrayed in the film by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench .

Biographies

The British writer AN Wilson wrote a biography of Murdoch in 2003: Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (Iris Murdoch as I knew her). This book has been called a "mischievous revelation" and "quite spectacularly naughty" by The Guardian magazine . Wilson himself called his book an "anti-biography" and describes Murdoch's sexual permissiveness and infidelity: that it "flourished in acts of deception", was ruthless and "ready to go to bed with almost anyone" (Wilson 2003).

Works

Novels

  • Under the Net , Chatto and Windus, London 1954; New edition by Vintage, London 2004, ISBN 0-09-945844-6
  • The Flight from the Enchanter , Chatto & Windus, London 1956
  • The Sandcastle (1957)
    • German: Die Sandburg , translated by Maria Wolff . Piper, Munich 1959
  • The Bell (1958)
    • German: The waters of sin , translated by Maria Wolff. Piper, Munich 1962
  • A Severed Head (1961)
  • To Unofficial Rose (1962)
  • The Unicorn (1963)
  • The Italian Girl (1964)
  • The Red and the Green (1965)
  • The Time of the Angels (1966)
  • The Nice and the Good (1968)
  • Bruno's Dream (1969)
  • A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970)
  • An Accidental Man (1971)
    • German: One man among many , translated by Inge Wiskott. Ehrenwirth, Munich 1980
  • The Black Prince (1973)
    • German: The Black Prince , translated by Herbert Schlueter . Claassen, Düsseldorf 1975
    • newly translated by Stefanie Schaffer-de Vries. Deuticke, Vienna 1998; Piper, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-492-50119-4
  • The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)
  • A Word Child (1975)
  • Henry and Cato (1976)
  • The Sea, the Sea (1978), awarded the Booker Prize
    • German: The sea, the sea , translated by Margitta de Hervás and Kyra Stromberg. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1981; Piper, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-492-50118-7
  • Nuns and Soldiers (1980)
  • The Philosopher's Pupil (1983)
  • The Good Apprentice (1985)
    • German: With good intentions , translated by Utta Roy-Seifert . Deuticke, Vienna 1999
  • The Book and the Brotherhood (1987)
  • The Message to the Planet (1989)
  • The Green Knight (1993)
  • Jackson's Dilemma (1995)
  • Something Special (abridged 1999 edition; original published 1957)

philosophy

  • Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)
  • The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
  • The Fire and the Sun (1977)
  • Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986)
  • Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)
  • Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

Plays

  • A Severed Head (with JB Priestly, 1964)
  • The Italian Girl (with James Saunders, 1969)
  • The Three Arrows & The Servants and the Snow (1973)
  • The Black Prince (1987), German: The Black Prince

Poetry

  • A Year of Birds (1978; revised edition 1984)
  • Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Murdoch's first novel Unter dem Netz was selected in 2001 by the editorial team of the American publisher Modern Library , a subsidiary of Random House , as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
  2. ↑ Biography about Irsi Murdoch, in: http://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/itis-murdoch/
  3. ↑ Honorary Members: Iris Murdoch. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 16, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Honorary Doctorates from the University of Cambridge
  5. ^ Peter J. Conradi: Iris Murdoch: A Life. Norton, New York 2001, ISBN 978-0-393-04875-9
  6. ↑ Justin Broackes (Ed.): Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: a collection of essays. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-928990-5 .
  7. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/03/biography.features11
  8. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/06/biography.highereducation
personal data
SURNAME Murdoch, Iris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Murdoch, Jean Iris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Dublin
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1999
Place of death Oxford