Dame Jean Iris Murdoch is an Irish writer, philosopher and critic best known for her novels about good and evil, sexuality, morality and the power of the unconscious. She is considered one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century, as the British newspaper The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945". Under the Window is her first published novel, which was chosen in 1998 by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. In 1987, Iris was awarded one of the most distinguished orders of the British Empire, the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She has published 4 books of philosophy, a collection of poetry, 6 plays, a collection of essays and 26 novels, including The Bell, The Severed Head, The Red and the Green, The Good and the Nice, The Brown Prince, Henry and Cato, The Sea, The Sea and Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, the sister of Irene Alice Wells and John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant from Hillhall, County Down, was raised in a Presbyterian family that depended primarily on cattle breeding. In 1915, he enlisted as a soldier in King Edward's Cavalry and served in France during World War I, before attaining the rank of second lieutenant. Her mother had been training as a singer before giving birth to Iris, and she was raised in a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Iris's parents first met in Dublin, when her father was on leave, and they married in 1918. Iris was the couple's only child, and after a few Weeks after her birth the family moved to London, where her father joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class civil servant.:67 Murdoch was educated at non-government progressive schools; She attended Froebel Dunstrasse School in 1925, and then Badminton School in Bristol as an expatriate from 1932 to 1938. In the same year, she entered Somerville College, Oxford University, to learn English, and then transferred to study classics. At Oxford she studied philosophy with Donald M. MacKinnon, and attended Edward Frankl's seminars on Agamemnon. She obtained first class honours in 1942. After leaving Oxford, she went to work in London for Her Majesty's Treasury. In June 1944, she left the Treasury and went to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She was initially posted to the agency's European Regional Office in London. In 1945, she moved first to Brussels, then to Innsbruck, and finally to Graz, Austria, where she worked in a refugee camp. She left the administration in 1946. From 1947 to 1948 Iris Murdoch studied philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met Wittgenstein, but did not attend any of his lectures, as he had left his postgraduate position at Trinity College before she could begin her studies.:262–263 In 1948 she became a member of the faculty at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she studied philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967 she taught one day a week in the General Studies Department of the Royal College of Art.:469 Murdoch married the literary critic and novelist John Bayley in 1956. Bayley had been Professor of English at the Wharton School, Oxford, from 1974 to 1992, whom Iris had met at Oxford in 1954. This unusual romantic relationship lasted for more than forty years until his death. Murdoch. Bailey saw the issue of sex as a silly but inevitable one, unlike Murdoch, who had multiple issues with both men and women, which Bailey himself occasionally witnessed. Iris Murdoch published her first novel, Under the Window, in 1954. She had previously published articles on philosophy, as well as the first monograph in English on Jean-Paul Sartre. She subsequently published 25 more novels and additional works on philosophy, as well as poetry and drama. In 1976, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.:571, 575 She has received honorary doctorates from several universities - including, but not limited to, the University of Bath, the University of Cambridge in 1993, and Kingston University in 1994. She was elected to honorary external membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. Iris Murdoch published Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was published in 1995. In 1997, Iris was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and died in 1999. Her philosophical writings were influenced by Simone Weil, from whom Iris borrowed the term "attention," and Plato, under whose banner she claimed to fight. 76 Iris wanted to revive Plato's ideas by giving them power to the truth of goodness, and to the vague sense of the moral life as a long journey from illusion to truth. From this perspective, Murdoch offers sharp criticisms of Kant, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. In her novels, which are characterized by generosity and concern for the interior lives of individuals, she follows in the tradition of novelists such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Proust, as well as showing a deep love of Shakespeare. Yet there is a tremendous variety in her achievement, and the rich layered structure and comic fantasy mixed with the compelling realism of The Dark Prince differ from earlier comic novels such as Under the Window or The Unicorn. The Unicorn is a Gothic romance novel that appeals to the cultured, or a novel embellished with Gothic motifs, or perhaps a parody of the Gothic style of writing. The Dark Prince, for which Murdoch won the James Tait Dark Memorial Literary Prize, is a study in sexual obsession. The text becomes more complex with multiple interpretations when secondary characters oppose the mysterious narrator or author of the book in a series of sequences. Although her novels differ from each other markedly and her style has evolved, themes recur. Her novels often feature educated, upper-middle-class men in moral dilemmas, homosexual characters, refugees, Anglo-Catholics in crises of faith, sympathetic pets, children eager for knowledge, or sometimes a man of power and demonic spirit, a "magician" who imposes his will on the other characters. There is a type of male character that some consider Murdoch's incarnation of her lover, the Nobel Prize winner, Elias. Canetti:350–352 Murdoch won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a meticulously detailed novel about the power of both love and loss, featuring a retired stage manager who becomes jealous when he sees his former lover decades after they have been separated. In 1997, a collection of her authorised poems, The Poems of Iris Murdoch, was published by Paul Holla and Yuzo Mrouya. Some of her work has been adapted for television, including the British television series The Unofficial Rose and The Bell Jar. J. B. Priestley's dramatic adaptation of her 1961 novel The Severed Head made stars of both Ian Holm and Richard Attenborough. In 1997, English PEN awarded her the Golden Pen Award "for a lifetime of distinguished service to literature". Iris Murdoch won a scholarship to Vassar College in 1946, but was refused a visa. She entered the United States because she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1938 while a student at Oxford University. She left the party in 1942, when she went to work in the Treasury, but remained a communist sympathizer for several years.:172:15 After several years she was allowed to visit the United States, but always obtained an exemption from the provisions of the McCarran Act, which barred Communist Party members and former members from entering the country. In a 1990 interview with the Paris Review, she said that her membership in the Communist Party had made her see “how powerful and powerful it is, but certainly in its organized form.”:210 Apart from her membership in the Communist Party, her Irish heritage is another tangible aspect of Murdoch’s interesting political life. Part of this interest revolves around the fact that, although she is Irish by birth and descent, Murdoch does not display the range of political views that one of that origin is supposed to hold: “Not everyone agrees on who has the right to claim the name of identity.” Irish. Iris's cousins, from Belfast, call themselves British, not Irish...from a father and mother who were raised in Ireland, and the lineage in Northern and Southern Ireland goes back three centuries. Iris has as much authority to claim to be Irish as most North Americans call themselves American.':24 Peter J. Conradi's 2001 biography was the result of extensive research and a permitted entry in other magazines and newspapers. The impetus for the work was his love affair and friendship with Murdoch, which lasted from the time they met when she was giving the Gifford Lectures until her death. The book was well received, with John Updike commenting that "there would be no need to complain about literary biographies later if they were all of the same quality." The text addresses many of the common questions about Murdoch, such as how she was Irish, what political orientation she held, etc. Although Conradi is not a trained historian, his interest in Murdoch's achievements is As a memoirist he is most evident in his autobiography, most evident in his earlier work of literary criticism, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Works of Iris Murdoch. He also recalls his personal encounters with Murdoch over his conversion to Buddhism in two 2005 booklets, Panic and Emptiness, Buddha and I. Conrad's archive of Murdoch-related material, together with the Iris Murdoch Library at Oxford University, is housed at Kingston University. A. N. Wilson has given an account of Murdoch's colourful and ambitious life in his 2003 book Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her. Galen Strawson in The Guardian called this work "a damaging revelation", and Wilson himself called it an "anti-autobiography." Wilson avoids objectivity, but is careful to emphasize his own affinity for the subject. Wilson explains that Murdoch was "one of those cheerful young women... who was always getting ready to go to bed alone.":59 Although Murdoch's thought was an inspiration to Conradi, Wilson sees Murdoch's philosophical work as a fragment. In a 2009 interview with BBC Radio 4, Wilson expressed his opinion of Murdoch and her work, conceding that no doctor could have said that Murdoch's struggle to complete her final philosophical book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, reduced her sense of despair and led to her developing Alzheimer's disease in a short time. David Morgan met Iris Murdoch in 1964, when he was a student at the Royal College of Art. :475 He described their lifelong friendship in his 2010 memoir, With Love and Fury: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch. John Bailey wrote two memoirs about his life with Iris Murdoch. Iris: A Memoir in the UK was published in 1998, shortly before her death. The American edition was published in 1999 as Iris's Elegy. A sequel, Iris and Her Friends, was published posthumously later that year. Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's 2001 film Iris, based on Bailey's memories of his wife as she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Iris Murdoch Season in 2015, with a series of memoirs by close friends, as well as dramatizations of her novels. Iris Murdoch's writings were not limited to her novels, but she left behind her A remarkable legacy of letters to friends, totalling 760 letters, totalling 3,000 pages, is preserved at the Iris Murdoch Centre for Studies at Kingston University, whose director has described the letters as providing a rare insight into Murdoch's life and private thoughts. Murdoch described herself in one of her letters to her friend, the philosopher Philippa Foot, in May 1968, as "an indefatigable letter writer." In 2001, American director Richard Eyre produced a film about Iris Murdoch's life based on the memoirs of her husband John Bayley, which he published in 1998 when she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The film won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.