Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995

by Iris Murdoch, Avril Horner (Editor), Anne Rowe (Editor)

Overview

For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years

Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has been Murdoch's own voice—her life in her own words. Living on Paper—the first major collection of Murdoch's most compelling and interesting personal letters—gives, for the first time, a rounded self-portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. With more than 760 letters, fewer than forty of which have been published before, the book provides a unique chronicle of Murdoch's life from her days as a schoolgirl to her last years. The result is the most important book about Murdoch in more than a decade.

The letters show a great mind at work—struggling with philosophical problems, trying to bring a difficult novel together, exploring spirituality, and responding pointedly to world events. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity, especially in letters to lovers or close friends, such as the writers Brigid Brophy, Elias Canetti, and Raymond Queneau, philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Philippa Foot, and mathematician Georg Kreisel. We witness Murdoch's emotional hunger, her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable, and her irreverence and sharp sense of humor. We also learn how her private life fed into the plots and characters of her novels, despite her claims that they were not drawn from reality.

Direct and intimate, these letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person, making for an extraordinary reading experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691180922
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Pages:	688
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Iris Murdoch (1919–99) was a British writer and philosopher. Her twenty-six novels include the Booker Prize–winning The Sea, the Sea. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe are the coeditors of Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts and Iris Murdoch and Morality.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction xi

Part One: Schoolgirl and Student, August 1934 to December 1941 1

Part Two: Work and War, July 1942 to October 1947 21

Part Three: Academic and Author, October 1947 to September 1954 93

Part Four: Decisions, February 1955 to December 1962 163

Part Five: The RCA Years, January 1963 to November 1967 233

Part Six: Woman of Letters, January 1968 to December 1978 351

Part Seven: Dame Iris, January 1979 to December 1989 465

Part Eight: Last Letters, February 1990 to September 1995 557

Directory of Names and Terms 600

Murdoch’s Novels and Their Dedicatees 628

Sources of Letters 629

Abbreviations 632

Notes 633

Acknowledgements 641

Index 645

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This collection of letters provides a fascinating insight into the life of a complex and important novelist. It is a wonderful book."—Alexander McCall Smith

"I remember seeing Iris Murdoch toward the end of her life at a party: despite her illness, her expression was joyous, serene, and intent—almost Buddha-like. These qualities come through strongly in this remarkable collection of letters. We find a passionate engagement with the world of ideas, but most of all with friends, lovers, and pupils. These letters reveal Murdoch's extraordinary talent for affection, exuberant sense of fun, razor-sharp intelligence, and acute awareness of the transcendent."—Karen Armstrong, author of The Spiral Staircase

"Few writers comprehend the murky human messiness of desire like Iris Murdoch, or could plot like her, and these letters show us why. Her life—the multiple lovers, the emotional strain, the terrible food, the nuns and prizes and philosophy—was chaos. She'll always be my favorite writer; now I understand why."—Charlotte Mendelson, author of When We Were Bad

"Reading these letters is like living Murdoch's whole creatively, sexually, and intellectually voracious life alongside her, and at breakneck speed. Thrilling."—Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

Editorial Reviews

"Anyone who misses the regular appearance of new Murdoch novels will find plenty to enjoy and admire in these letters. They pitch us back into her cerebral yet vaguely surreal and magical intellectual world."—-Dwight Garner, New York Times

"[A] compulsively readable volume."—-Daniel Johnson, Standpoint

"Readers come closer to Iris Murdoch—the writer, the friend, the lover, the person—than either Peter Conradi's official biography or [John] Bayley's memoirs allowed. . . . It's this Iris Murdoch—compulsively discursive, doggedly happy—who dominates Living on Paper and fills it with the kind of smart, nimble-footed small talk that is always the principal joy of reading letter collections."—-Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

"[A] treasure trove…. The letters are fervent, philosophical, frenetic and witty; they suggest sources, from her own life, for the varied portraits of obsessive desire in her novels."—-Rivka Isaacson, Independent

"My favorite read of 2016. . . . But what about those weird novels? A Severed Head? The Bell? Bruno's Dream? The Nice and the Good? The Sea, the Sea? And so-the-so-on? Addictive, hilarious: pure intellectual crystal meth. If, like me, you've read them all, you'll hoover these letters up at once."—-Terry Castle, Artforum

From the Publisher

"Spanning 60 years and including more than 700 letters, this collection reveals the contours of Murdoch's personality and her important friendships. . . . Readers will be introduced to many of Murdoch's longtime correspondents from her early days as a student, communist activist, and United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation worker, and they will see those relationships develop throughout her career."

Choice

Every letter, in its way, is a love letter, at least every personal one. The letters of the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch contained more yearning than most. She was, to borrow the title of one of her novels, a kind of sacred and profane love machine…Anyone who misses the regular appearance of new Murdoch novels will find plenty to enjoy and admire in these letters. They pitch us back into her cerebral yet vaguely surreal and magical intellectual world. Her mind, here as in everything she wrote, is formidable.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

12/21/2015
Novelist and philosopher Murdoch was a dedicated correspondent, as this hefty collection attests. Spanning six decades, and encompassing dozens of recipients, this collection of her letters provide a lens through which to view many events in her life: membership in the Communist party while a student at Oxford in the 1930s; her embrace of existentialism in the post-WWII years; the publication of her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954; her marriage to fellow novelist John Bayley in 1956. The letters touch on many weighty intellectual topics, and they are equally remarkable for their candor—for instance, while a postgraduate at Oxford in 1948, she writes, “I find myself feeling much solider, slower, warmer, more imaginative and less spirituelle than most of the people around me.” Regarding her writing, 10 years later: “I just have a ghastly conviction of second-rateness and no notion of how to get up from where I am.” Murdoch died in 1999 from complications of Alzheimer’s, a disease that she knew was taking its toll on her writing, and the last line of the final letter included here—“Please forgive all this stumbling”—is a poignant postscript to the life of the mind recounted in these engrossing and frequently moving letters. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2015-11-03
An intimate view of the prolific British novelist and philosopher. For hours each day, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) (Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 1998, etc.) sat at her roll-top desk writing letters—by hand, often with a Montblanc fountain pen—to friends, lovers, editors, students, and even strangers who asked about her work. From 5,000 letters, Horner (Emerita, English Literature/Kingston Univ.) and Rowe (English/Kingston Univ.), co-editors of Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts (2012), have judiciously selected more than 760 that represent Murdoch's passions and interests, her reflections on her career, and her views on politics, philosophy, religion, and culture. With their deep knowledge of Murdoch's life and work, the editors have produced an authoritative, readable, and informative volume that contextualizes the writer's vibrant, intense, and sometimes slyly witty correspondence. Murdoch's love affairs form one important theme. "I find myself astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men all at once," she wrote to a friend at the age of 20. Four years later she confessed to another that she had, at last, lost her virginity. She was sleeping with two men at the time, neither of whom she loved. Murdoch's consuming passion was her ambition to write "a long long and exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself and observe in the characters of others." Her love life—with men and women—was complicated, as she struggled to juggle her lovers' demands with what the astute editors call her "deep and confusing sexual tensions." Murdoch's literary reputation was complicated, as well: "her idiosyncratic brand of mystical realism" and moral philosophy garnered early praise but later fell out of fashion when "doubts about her philosophy fed doubts about her novels." She often felt overcome, she writes, by "a ghastly conviction of second-ratedness." An impressively edited, sharply revealing life in letters.

Kirkus Reviews