Iris Murdoch A Life

In Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi assesses the remarkable intellectual & cultural legacy of the celebrated philosopher & beloved novelist. Depicting her personal life in extraordinary detail--her student days at Oxford, her Communist activities, her early affairs, & her enduring marriage to John Bayley--he also deftly interprets her philosophical works & twenty-six novels with brilliant clarity & insight. Murdoch emerges as a writer who in her early years imagined herself as the heir to George Eliot but later found a kinship with Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, his obsessions with sadomasochism, & his philosophical fascination with moral anarchy. Relying on ninety-five hitherto unseen diaries, hundreds of interviews, & thousands of letters, Conradi has written a riveting biography that is as much an absorbing history of literary England from 1940 to the present as it is a vivid depiction of one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.Conradi, Peter is the author of 'Iris Murdoch A Life', published 2001 under ISBN 9780393048759 and ISBN 0393048756.