Preface Chapter 1 Early Life

Home , An Accidental Man, An Unofficial Rose, A Word Child, Bel Mooney, Bidisha, Henry and Cato

Notes

Preface

1. This observation is made by Valerie Purton in IMC, p. 171. Murdoch’s letters to Suguna Ramanathan are in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 2. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto, 1953), p. 138. 3. Murdoch, interview with Rose, TCHF, pp. 17–18. 4. Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Chatto & Windus, [1954] 1982), p. 286. 5. Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), p. 249.

Chapter 1 Early Life

1. See Yozo Moroya and Paul Hullah (eds) Poems by Iris Murdoch (Okayama: University Education Press, 1997). This is a limited edition of 500 copies. Another very short book of poetry by Murdoch is A Year of Birds, with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone (London: Chatto, 1984). Other poems have appeared in various anthologies. 2. Murdoch’s very early essays are published in Yozo Moroya and Paul Hullah (eds) Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Okayama: University Education Press, 1997). This is a limited edition of 500 copies. 3. Purton records that ‘meeting her on a mailboat to Dublin, Richard Hamm- ond (son of Annie Hammond, witness to IM’s parents’ wedding) asks IM what she wishes to do in her life. She replies she wants to write’ (IMC, p. 7). 4. Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 54. 5. Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, in W.B. Yeats, The Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 294. 6. See Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 7. Murdoch, ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker’, in Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 90. 8 Priscilla Martin notes: ‘I read English at Somerville about twenty years later, found Miss Lascelles impossible to please and wish I too had changed to Classics.’ 9. A 22-line poem appeared there in May 1939 and in June she published a satirical polemic ‘The Irish: Are they Human?’ See Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, p. 12. 10. Mary Midgley interestingly recalls that (like the First World War) the situation did offer some opportunities to women, at least in wartime Oxford. There were only five women’s colleges and, until decades later when most colleges became mixed, women were heavily outnumbered by men. Proportionately there were more women in the system during 172 Notes 173

the War and men dominated the university less. Midgley also thinks that philosophy students benefited during the War years because, with the exodus of younger dons into the services, logical positivism dominated the faculty less (Mary Midgely, in conversation with Priscilla Martin). 11. Murdoch, The Red and the Green (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), pp. 284–5. 12. Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 70. 13. For a more detailed discussion of Murdoch’s civil servant characters, see Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London, Chapter 3, ‘Wooden Horses racing at a fair: Whitehall’, pp. 107–28. 14. It is unclear exactly how many novels were written before Under the Net. Even Murdoch’s biographer is unclear: ‘Sometimes she gave the figure of four, on one occasion six. A number were destroyed by her around 1986’ (IMAL, p. 170). One was turned down by T.S. Eliot, as we mention, and one was unfortunately called The Lady of the Bosky Gates. 15. The second article in July 1943 was a review of The Rebirth of Christianity by Stanley Cook and the third in September 1944 was a review of Worship and the Common Life by Eric Hayman. 16. See Part Four of Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which contains four essays on Murdoch’s theology: ‘The Dream that Does not Cease to Haunt Us: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’ by Anne Rowe; ‘A Story About a Man: The Demythologized Christ in the Work of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’ by Pamela Osborn; ‘ “Do Not Seek God Outside Your Own Soul”: Buddhism in The Green Knight’ by Tammy Grimshaw and ‘The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism’ by William Schweiker. 17. For a full analysis of the links between the work of Murdoch and Simone Weil, see Gabrielle Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). 18. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 1 October 1953, Chatto Archive, University of Reading. 19. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 16 October 1961, Chatto Archive. 20. See the Scotsman, 30 January 1983. This tension is also discussed in the introduction to IMAR, pp. 1–12. 21. Murdoch, interview with Blow, Spectator, 25 September 1976, pp. 24–5. 22. Plato, The Statesman (London: William Heinemann, 1952), 269b–274E. 23. Murdoch alludes to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), Book X, lines 693–4, J.C. Maxwell (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), where the poet famously describes his initial joy at the French Revolution. Like Wordsworth, Murdoch became more conservative. 24. See Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in EM, pp. 287–96. 25. Philippa Foot, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 26. These essays are both published in EM. See pp. 43–58 and 130–45 respectively. 27. Undated letter from 1972 to Nora Smallwood, Chatto Archive. 28. John Bayley, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 29. Letter to Ian Parsons, 16 November 1953, Chatto Archive. 30. Letter to Murdoch, 28 November 1953, Chatto Archive. 174 Notes

31. Murdoch, A Severed Head (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 13. 32. Lord David Cecil, document in Chatto Archive. 33. Times Literary Supplement, 9 September 1954, p. 437. 34. Kingsley Amis, Spectator, 11 June 1954, p. 722.

Chapter 2 After the War

1. New Criticism is the technique of examining the detail of a literary work in order to define its meaning without regard to author and context. 2. Robert Conquest, New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. xv. 3. Murdoch, interview with Jeffrey Meyers, TCHF, p. 226. 4. Murdoch met the French writer in Paris in 1946. They corresponded between 1946 and 1975 and Murdoch translated Pierrot into English. In one of her letters to Queneau, Murdoch wrote ‘anything I will ever write will owe so much so much to you’. See letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. In a letter to David Hicks, she says that she saw the French as ‘the real Master-Race’ (IMC, p. 36). 5. Murdoch, letter to Queneau, Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 6. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p. 9, hereafter SRR. 7. Murdoch’s notes from this lecture have been acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and are in the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. 8. See EM, pp. 287–98. 9. Quoted in SRR, p. 41. 10. Murdoch’s essays ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ and ‘The Existentialist Hero’ were published in the Listener in March 1950. 11. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 80. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). 13. See SRR, p. 97. 14. Plato, The Republic vii.514A–521B, trans. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1941). 15. Ibid: ‘A modern Plato would compare his Cave to an underground cinema, where the audience watch the play of shadows thrown by the film passing before the light at their backs’ (p. 223). 16. ‘An excessive self-forgetfulness will break down [the] the objective contours [of the work of art] and blend it with fantasy and dream [...] (It is charac- teristic of the art of the cinema to encourage, by its very form, this art of self-forgetting)’ (SRR, p. 97). 17. Murdoch herself did not bother much about make-up after her marriage. 18. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1991), Act 1, Scene 1, line 234. 19. Neary adapts a line in Faustus’s speech on the phantasm of Helen of Troy. Dr Faustus, Tucker Brooke (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1910), line 1334, p. 189. Notes 175

20. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Faber, 1988), p. 5. 21. Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 233. 22. Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Hero’, broadcast on 6 March 1950. BBC Script T679. In EM, pp. 108–16. 23. Mary Warnock, A Memoir (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 43. 24. See Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’ in EM, pp. 299–336. 25. Elias Canetti (1905–94) was born in Bulgaria and moved to Manchester when he was six years old. He wrote Die Blendung in 1935, which was translated as Auto-da-Fé and published in 1946. Crowds and Power appeared in 1962 and Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He is present in other enchanter characters in later novels, for example, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea. 26. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. A.F. Wells (London: Routledge, 1978). See Frances White, ‘“The World is just a Transit Camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (Kingston University Press, 2010), pp. 5–12. 27. Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 8. 28. When Rosa reminds Camilla Wingfield of her name she says, ‘Ah, yes your mother was an absolute bolshy’ (p. 110). Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-Jewish-German Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher and revolutionary for the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German SPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany. After her death, she achieved symbolic status amongst social democrats and Marxists. 29. Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe suggest a feminist aspect to The Flight from the Enchanter in Chapter 5, “‘Wooden horses racing at a fair”: Civil Servants and Whitehall’ in Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2008), pp. 107–28. The first feminist studies were Deborah Johnson’s Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), which evaluated Murdoch’s fiction in the light of then-current feminist critical theory, and Christine M. Sizemore’s A Female Vision of the City: London in the Novels of Five British Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). Other feminist studies include Tammy Grimshaw’s Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005) and essays by Tammy Grimshaw and Marije Altorf can be found in IMAR, pp. 163–74 and 175–87 respectively. Sabina Lovibond’s Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (2010) takes gender into consideration in Murdoch’s philosophy as well as in her novels.

Chapter 3 Triangles and Polygons

1. See Paul Binding, ‘Forgotten and Unknown? The Sandcastle Revisited’, Iris Murdoch Review, 1 (Kingston University Press, 2008): 23–7. 2. Purton notes that this incident took place in November 1955 (IMC, p. 72). 176 Notes

3. Murdoch’s formal experimentation in this novel is explored in more detail in Anne Rowe, VAIM, pp. 27–56. 4. Iris Murdoch, ‘I should hate to be alive and not writing a novel’, Women’s Journal (Supplement, October 1975), pp. 64–5. 5. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is a short story by Henry James. It is an elaborate skit on the failure of commentators to understand his literary technique – that the meaning of his narratives comes out of ‘the latent beauty which is the very soul and the core of his work’. Henry James, introduction to ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 25. 6. A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 78. 7. One reviewer of The Sandcastle could only attempt to express Murdoch’s style by suggesting it was the equivalent of giving a sonnet 28 lines of uneven feet (‘E. W. F.’, ‘New Form for the Novel’, Christian Science Monitor, April 1956). 8. Murdoch, interview by Magee, EM, pp. 3–30. 9. Murdoch, interview by Rose, TCHF, pp. 16–29. 10. There was one notable exception. Ronald Bryden, reviewing The Sandcastle for the Listener in 1957, compares Murdoch’s narrative technique to contemporary painting: Murdoch’s vision, he claims, ‘simply, is the vision of modern art [. . .] She imports, at last, into fiction the techniques and sensibility of the great French moderns, bridging a gap in taste which has kept the novel, in this country at least, a generation or more behind the visual arts. She writes as everyone since the Post-Impressionists has painted, to create form: joyously pulling reality about to yield the most brilliant surprising patterns of colour and relation’ (Ronald Bryden, ‘New Novels’, Listener, 16 May 1957), p. 8. 11. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 24 May 1956, Chatto Archive, University of Reading. 12. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 1 March 1957, Chatto Archive. 13. Murdoch interview with Simon Blow, Spectator, 25 September 1976, pp. 24–5. 14. See Anne Rowe, ‘“The Dream that Does Not Cease to Haunt Us”: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 141–55. 15. Paul Tillich uses this description of God in Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–63) and it became popular among demy- thologizing theologians. Murdoch refers to Tillich several times in MGM. 16. Murdoch, The Bell (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 221. 17. There are in fact five ‘sermons’ in total which invite comparison: one by Michael, James, Catherine, Nick and the Abbess. 18. Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 278. 19. See Murdoch, ‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality’, Man and Society, vii (Summer 1964): 172–3. 20. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 228. Notes 177

21. Richard Todd, Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearean Interest (London: Vision Press, 1979), p. 76. 22. John Bowen, letter to Peter Calvocoressi, 17 November 1958, Chatto Archive. 23. Murdoch, The Bell (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 316. 24. Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 502. 25. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London: Constable, 1960), p. 4. 26. The Times, 8 May 1963. 27. New York Times, 20 April 1961. 28. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 3 December 1960, Chatto Archive. 29. Murdoch, A Severed Head (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 205. 30. Twilight of the Gods is the last of four operas that make up the Ring of Nibelung by Richard Wagner. 31. Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 32. 32. There is a fuller account of the relationship between Murdoch and James by Priscilla Martin in ‘Houses of Fiction: Iris Murdoch and Henry James’ in IMAR, pp. 124–35. 21 For a much more detailed discussion of Murdoch’s use of the painting, see Chapter 3, ‘A Complete and Powerful Picture of the Soul’ in IMVA, pp. 57–84. 33. A more extensive discussion of Murdoch’s aesthetics in this novel can be found in IMVA, pp. 75–84. 34. Murdoch, interview by Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen & Co., 1986), p. 199. 35. Murdoch quotes this passage in MGM, pp. 170–1. 36. Degrees of Freedom, p. 143. 37. See in particular Murdoch, ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, EM, pp. 243–59.

Chapter 4 Ireland

1. Murdoch, interview with Chevalier, TCHF, p. 94. ‘Being Polish is of course no joke, but Polish intellectuals tend to possess a detachment and a kind of sardonic equilibrium unpretended to by, say, their Irish equivalent’ (John Bayley, Selected Essays ([Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 191). 2. 3 June 1939. 3. A.N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003), p. 123, hereafter IMKH. 4. When Murdoch and John Bayley were invited to the University of Caen in 1981 for a conference on Irish History, Bayley was amused that Murdoch was considered an Irish writer (IMC, p. 159). 5. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 21. 6. Murdoch, A Severed Head (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 14. 7. Murdoch, Message to the Planet (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 5. 8. Murdoch, Henry and Cato (1976; London: Vintage, 2007), p. 39. 178 Notes

9. (London: The Reprint Society, 1955). 10. ‘Something Special’ was also published by Vintage in 2001 with illustra- tions by Michael McCurdy. The writer Elizabeth Jane Howard is quoted on the cover, praising the story as a ‘delight for Murdoch enthusiasts’, perhaps implying its rather limited appeal to general readers. 11. See Avril Horner, ‘Refinements of Evil: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 70–86. Other critics who have analysed Murdoch’s gothic plots are Zoreh T. Sullivan, ‘The Contracting Universe of Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Winter, 1977–8), pp. 557–69; Dorothy A. Winsor, ‘Solipsistic Sexuality in Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, in Harold Bloom (ed.) Iris Murdoch (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), pp. 121–30; and Peter Conradi analyses the Gothic effects of the ‘closed’ novels in SA. 12. See also Bran Nicol, ‘The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative’ in IMR, pp. 100–11. 13. Murdoch, interview by Jean-Louis Chevalier. TCHF, p. 86. 14. A number of novels have been identified as Gothic or as embodying Gothic elements, for example, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Bell (1958), The Unicorn (1963), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Italian Girl (1964) and The Sea, The Sea (1978). 15. Anne Rowe suggests that the imagery is linked to Pre-Raphaelite painting. See VAIM, Chapter 2, ‘Painting, Literature and Form’, pp. 27–46. 16. Murdoch, The Unicorn (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 15. 17. Murdoch, interview by Chevalier, TCHF, p. 94. 18. Murdoch, The Red and the Green (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), p. 134. 19. Before its publication, the author and critic Martin Goff told Ian Parsons at Chatto that a dramatis personae or family tree was needed, but unfortunately this suggestion was not acted on (letter from Goff to Parsons, 1 August 1965, Chatto Archive, University of Reading). A family tree to The Nice and the Good would be useful indeed. The plot is so complex that even Peter Conradi, one of Murdoch’s best and most attentive readers, has been forced into error: ‘Family resemblances are beautifully observed. Paula’s son Pierce’s awkward simplicity and passion recall his mother’s studious virtue’ (SA, p. 182). Pierce’s mother is Mary, whom Conradi describes as the mother of Paula’s twins. 20. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 21. Hilda Spear, Modern Novelists: Iris Murdoch, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 51. 22. The line is from Yeats’s ‘Under Ben Bulben’, W.B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 325. 23. Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 24. This is virtually the only episode in Murdoch’s fiction about which she sounded attentive to the criticisms of editors: ‘Viking people write to say they do not like the scene in the kitchen [. . .] They are quite right, of course, and it worried me a lot [. . .] I was sorry to have to introduce Notes 179

incest again but I couldn’t think of any other sanction strong enough to influence Andrew’ (undated letter to Norah Smallwood, Chatto Archive). Murdoch seems to have felt for once that this was one ‘unearned’ sexual permutation too many. Norah, however, advised against rewriting pre- cisely because of its irrelevance: ‘whether or not true, [it] is not significant in the course of events or the construction of character’ (letter from Norah Smallwood to Murdoch, 28 January 1965, Chatto Archive). 25. In a letter to Chatto, 19 March 1965, Chatto Archive. 26. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 151. 27. Donna Gerstenberger, Iris Murdoch (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1975), p. 68. 28. W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’. 29. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 890. 30. In June 1983 Murdoch argued with her old friend Mary Midgley about Ireland, defending the actions of Ian Paisley and the cause of the Ulster Protestants with whom she strongly identified (IMC, p. 163). In a letter to Roly Cochrane in 1986, she called herself 100% Irish. The letters from Iris Murdoch to Roly Cochrane have been acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and are in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 31. Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 126.

Chapter 5 New Directions, Constant Themes

1. Priscilla Martin saw the play and was disappointed. She thinks she was, ‘perhaps trivially, affronted by the electric “log fire” in the Lynch- Gibbons’ drawing room and never imagined that the couple “switched on the logs in the grate”’. The play seemed to her to work mostly at the upper levels of the fiction, to represent only the comic surface and offer little but a glib psychological rationale for the action. 2. Guardian, 8 April 1963. 3. Letter to Peggy Ramsey, Chatto Archive, University of Reading. 4. On 8 September 1963 (IMAL, p. 459). 5. The Times, 13 September 1964. 6. The publishers Samuel French brought out the play of The Italian Girl, adapted by James Saunders, in 1967. 7. Murdoch, Joanna, Joanna (London: Colophon Press, 1994). 8. John Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963). 9. For a more detailed discussion of this influence, see Priscilla Martin, ‘Houses of Fiction: Iris Murdoch and Henry James’ in IMAR, pp. 124–35. 10. Murdoch, interview by Rose. TCHF, p. 22–3. 11. See Murdoch’s interview with Ronald Bryden and A.S. Byatt, ‘Talking to Iris Murdoch’, Listener (4 April 1968), pp. 433–4. 180 Notes

12. After Murdoch left St Anne’s the painter Marie Louise Motesiczky painted her portrait for the college. The portrait now hangs in the Principal’s dining room. In a letter to Elias Canetti, Motesiczky wrote that Murdoch ‘really had a very good face if one understands that she is a man and not a woman’ (see Ines Schlenker, ‘Painting the Author: The Portrait of Iris Murdoch by Marie-Louise Motesiczky’, Iris Murdoch News Letter 15 [Winter 2001]: 1–4). Murdoch thought the portrait ‘wonderful, terrible, so sad and frightening, me with the demons. How did she know?’ (IMAL, p. 374). 13. See With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch by David Morgan (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010). 14. See Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 15. Murdoch, The Bell (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 81. 16. Murdoch, A Word Child (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 22. 17. David Hockney, quoted in Christopher Frayling, Royal College of Art: One Hundred Years of Art and Design (London: Collins and Brown, 1987), p. 162. 18. Frank Auerbach, quoted in Frayling, p. 160. 19. In the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 20. Carolyn Dinan was a student at the RCA from 1964 to 1968. She was taught by Murdoch and particularly remembers her extreme kindness when Carolyn took a year out from her studies because of illness (Carolyn Dinan, in conversation with Anne Rowe, 2 February 2009). 21. These are examples only. For a full discussion of Murdoch’s use of paintings, see Anne Rowe, VAIM. 22. Peter Conradi, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 23. Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 73. 24. See Part III, ‘Morality Without God: Iris Murdoch’s Secular Theology’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) which contains four essays on Murdoch’s theology by Anne Rowe, Pamela Osborn, Tammy Grimshaw and William Schweiker. 25. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1966] 1968), p. 72. 26. Peter Conradi and Anne Rowe suggest affinities between the character of Leo and David Morgan, Murdoch’s student at the RCA. See Anne Rowe’s introduction to David Morgan, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010). 27. Pamela Osborn, however, sees Anthea Barlow quite differently, as one of Murdoch’s secular Christ figures. See ‘A Story About a Man: The Demy- thologized Christ in the Work of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’ in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 156–67. 28. Murdoch, The Nice and the Good, pp. 143–4. 29. Ibid. Notes 181

30. Mark Luprecht investigates the mystical aspect of the character of Nigel Boase in ‘Death and Goodness: Bruno’s Dream and “The Sovereignty of Good”’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, pp. 113–23. 31. Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 122.

Chapter 6 The Love Machine

1. Joanna, Joanna was never performed but was published by Colophon Press in 1994. 2. The novel is dedicated to Janet and Reynolds Stone, with whom Murdoch and John Bayley stayed for weekends in Dorset during the 1960s and 1970s. Valerie Purton suggests that there may have been ‘a subliminal imaginative transformation of the Stones into the Fosters’. See ‘Iris Murdoch and the Art of Dedication’, Iris Murdoch Review, 1 (2008): 33. 3. TCHF, p. 73. In an interview in 1986, Murdoch acknowledges her fondness for this allegory but says that the book can also be read as a straightforward story (IMC, p. 177). In May 1969 Murdoch noted in her journal that she had noticed for the first time that her novels centre on the conflict between two men (IMC, p. 115). 4. Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward bought the film rights to A Fairly Honourable Defeat in 1971, but Murdoch did not like Peter Ustinov’s script and the project did not come to fruition (IMC, p. 121). 5. Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 26. 6. Murdoch’s interest in music also pervades the novels. See Darlene Mettler, Sound and Sense: Musical Imagery Allusion and Imagery in the Novels of Iris Murdoch (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Murdoch’s book of Poems, A Year of Birds, was set to music by Sir Malcolm Williamson and performed at the BBC Proms at the Albert Hall on 19 August 1995. Murdoch also wrote the words to ‘The Round Horizon’, a Cantata with music by Christopher Beckman for the 125th anniversary of the Badminton School. 7. Byron, The Vision of Judgement, stanzas XXXIII, XXXV. 8. Murdoch, ‘The Fire and the Sun’, EM, p. 461. 9. See TCHF, pp. 17–18. 10. Cecil Woolf and John Baggeley, Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (London: Owen, 1967), p. 40. In her interview with W.K. Rose, when asked if she would write a propaganda play she said that she would like to write one about Vietnam but would be careful to distinguish ‘propaganda plays’ from art – they are an alternative method of making people pay attention. She went on to say that she thought social commitment in so far as it interferes with art is very often a mistake (TCHF, pp. 17–18). 11. Murdoch, The One Alone (London: Colophon Press with Old Town Books, 1994). The BBC radio play was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 13 February 1987. 12. Priscilla Martin saw this production. She remembers how Julian’s horri- fied speech about the row with her parents – ‘He shouted [. . .] and she 182 Notes

shouted [. . .] and then I screamed and oh Bradley, I didn’t know ordinary educated middle-class English people could behave the way that we behaved last night’ – drew the longest laugh of the evening from the middle-class audience (see The Black Prince [1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995], p. 294). 13. Murdoch could have heard Edgar Wind’s lectures at Oxford in the 1950s and was likely to be familiar with the book based on them, which discusses this neo-Platonic interpretation. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1968). This discussion is extracted from Anne Rowe’s much fuller analysis of Murdoch’s links with Wind’s theories about this myth and the painting in VAIM, pp. 140–1 and 143. 14. Max Lejour in The Unicorn describes the concept of Ate, which is, in ancient Greek, the personification of moral blindness in which good and bad can- not be distinguished or a goddess who causes rash blind actions. ‘Recall the idea of Ate which was so real to the Greeks’, says Max. ‘Ate is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Ate. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They then have to pass it on, to use power on others’ (The Unicorn [1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], p. 98). 15. ‘High Theory’ is the term given to the tendency of literary critics of the 1980s and 1990s to produce highly-theorized readings of literary texts that marginalized or discredited readings which merely explored texts without rigorous attention to a variety of criteria involved in their production. See Valentine Cunningham, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) and Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003). 16. See Anne Rowe, ‘Policemen in a Search Team; Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Ian McEwan’s Atonement’ in IMR, pp. 148–59, for a much more detailed discussion of this aspect of the novel in relation to Murdoch’s leg- acy to contemporary British fiction, in particular the work of Ian McEwan. 17. Murdoch, interview with Bigsby, TCHF, pp. 103–4. 18. Two critical positions have evolved: Conradi argues that the postscripts support Bradley’s position, while Bran Nicol suggests that the text makes readers suspicious of the very idea of truth itself. See Peter Conradi, SA, pp. 233–65 and Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 95–107. 19. Murdoch, in conversation with Richard Todd, TCHF, p. 186. 20. See Chapter 3, ‘Shadows that Puzzle the Mind: The Post Office Tower in The Black Prince’, in Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space: Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 59–80. 21. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine was published in March 1974 and won the Whitbread Literary Award for fiction in April. C.P Snow presented the prize with the caveat that this may not be her finest novel but that the award was to acknowledge Murdoch’s achievement as a major British writer (IMC, p. 131). 22. See ‘The Existentialist Hero’ and ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ in EM, pp. 108–15 and 221–34 respectively. Notes 183

23. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber, 1968), p. 149. 24. Ibid., p. 342. 25. Murdoch, A Word Child (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). 26. Priscilla Martin, herself a beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, does not think that many Oxford graduates from working-class backgrounds found the transition as difficult as Hilary. 27. Peter Conradi and Anne Rowe have suggested links between Hilary Burde and David Morgan, a student of Murdoch’s at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s: see the introduction to David Morgan, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston University Press, 2010). 28. See John Dunford and Paul Sharp, The Education System in England and Wales (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 17–24. 29. A term used about Murdoch’s civil servant father. See Peter Conradi, IMAL, p. 52. The book provides one of Murdoch’s most savage critiques of the civil service. See Chapter 5, ‘“Wooden Horses Racing at a Fair”: Murdoch’s Civil Servants and Whitehall’, in Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London, pp. 107–28. 30. For a more detailed discussion of the links between A Word Child and Peter Pan, see Chapter 4, ‘Dark Glee: Apparitions of Peter Pan’, in Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London, pp. 81–106. 31. See Peter Conradi, ‘Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life’, IMAR, pp. 189–203. 32. Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984) provides a provocative insight into the troubling sexuality of Barrie’s ‘innocent boy’. 33. Two of the novels of this period each bear a tragically prophetic strain. In The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Murdoch had described the gunning down of Harriet Gavender in a terrorist attack at an airport; in August 1973 an Arab terrorist attack at Athens airport killed four. In October 1971 Murdoch was interviewed by A.S. Byatt about An Accidental Man and was asked in particular how she constructed the novel. She said that she began with a central event – in this case the running over of the child – and then let the action wind around that. Less than a year later she was to break arrangements to be with Byatt after her young son was run over and killed by a car. 34. For a detailed study of Murdoch’s various uses for the City, see Sacred Space: Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London.

Chapter 7 Retreats and Returns

1. See Murdoch, interview by Biles, TCHF, pp. 56–69. 2. In her list of works that have influenced her, given to the British Council in 1976, Murdoch includes The Iliad, The Symposium, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, Our Mutual Friend, 184 Notes

The Golden Bowl, Fear and Trembling, L’Attente de Dieu and The Brothers Karamazov. Proust is included with a question mark (IMC, p. 138). 3. Murdoch, Henry and Cato (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 5. 4. Murdoch quotes and alludes to this book in EM, pp. 396 and 422, and in MGM, pp. 128 and 397. 5. Titian’s The Death of Actaeon is in the National Gallery in London. 6. For more detailed discussions of the role of all the paintings discussed in this chapter, see Anne Rowe, VAIM. Interestingly, John Bayley links Beckman and Canetti: ‘“Truly to confront the age” – great art does not often do that so self-consciously. Stendhal does it with lightness and élan; the painter Beckmann did it after the First World War with mythic violence and horror. Beckmann’s painting is probably the closest parallel in art to Canetti’s novel. Canetti does not mention him, but when writing his novel he surrounded himself with reproductions of Grünewald, who also inspired Beckmann.’ John Bayley, Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 180. 7. Murdoch, MGM, pp. 90–146. 8. Murdoch’s leather-bound Booker Prize presentation copy of The Sea, The Sea has been acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and is in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 9. Murdoch’s refusal to create a first-person female narrator is the subject of much critical debate and even criticism by feminist critics. However, Murdoch said in 1976 when she was writing The Sea, The Sea that she felt her own characters are in fact androgynous. She does not believe in a male and female mind (see Murdoch, interview with Sheila Hale, in Harpers and Queen, February 1976). 10. Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 39. 11. A number of critics consider Murdoch’s links to Shakespeare, including Conradi in SA, who discusses Shakespeare’s influence on Murdoch and his presence in The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea. Hilda Spear in Iris Murdoch also alludes to the presence of Shakespeare’s plays in some of Murdoch’s plots. See also Richard Todd, Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearian Interest (London: Vision Press, 1979). 12. For an analysis of Murdoch’s dealings with the past in her fiction, see Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 13. The painting is still exhibited at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square in London. 14. See EM, pp. 406–7. Murdoch uses the tern in EM frequently to refer to ‘recollection’. Much pleasure in art, she suggests, ‘is a pleasure of recogni- tion of what we vaguely knew was there but never saw before. [. . .] Good art is [. . .] anamnesis, “memory” of what we did not know we knew’ (EM, p. 12). For Plato it was the recollection of the knowledge the soul had before birth. 15. In SA, Conradi discusses aspects of Murdoch’s interest in Buddhism in Under the Net, The Nice and the Good, The Sea, The Sea, Henry and Cato and Notes 185

The Green Knight. See also Tammy Grimshaw, ‘“Do not seek God outside your own soul”: Buddhism in The Green Knight’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 16. Murdoch, interview in the Daily Telegraph, 26 November 1978. 17. Murdoch, interview with Bigsby (TCHF, pp. 97–119). In this interview, Murdoch says that we are to accept the paranormal happenings in the novel; she believes that such events probably occur, especially in Tibet. 18. For a detailed discussion of the character of James Arrowby as one of Murdoch’s good men, see Suguna Ramanathan, Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 67–96. 19. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 457. 20. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 284. 21. After her visit to the Spenders’ holiday home in 1977, Murdoch felt she could now write about her own near-drowning. Nuns and Soldiers is dedicated to Natasha and Stephen Spender, whose presence in the novel has been suggested by Valerie Purton (see ‘Iris Murdoch and the Art of Dedication’ in the Iris Murdoch Review, 1 [2008]: 28–36). 22. Maria Smolenska Greenwood looks at Murdoch’s representation of the Count in ‘Dilemmas of Difference: The Polish Figure and the Moral World in Iris Murdoch’s Nuns and Soldiers’ in the forthcoming Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (Kingston University Press, 2010), pp. 13–18. 23. See Peter J. Conradi, ‘The Metaphysical Hostess’, ELH, xlviii (Summer 1981), pp. 472–83.

Chapter 8 The Late Novels

1. See Murdoch, interview with Jo Brans, TCHF, pp. 155–66. 2. Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas is the backdrop for Tom Phillips’s portrait of Iris Murdoch, which is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. 3. Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 23. 4. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 832. 5. Murdoch, interview with Slaymaker, TCHF, pp. 139–47. 6. Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 78. 7. See earlier discussion of Ate in Chapter 6. 8. For a full discussion of Jesse’s paintings, see Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 52. 9. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 275. 10. Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 21. 11. See Priscilla Martin, ‘Mentors and Moralists’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 186 Notes

12. Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 126. 13. Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 93. 14. Chaucer, ‘The Canterbury Tales’, in F.N Robinson (ed.) The Canterbury Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 1A2847–8. 15. Murdoch, The Green Knight (1993; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 19. 16. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldren (eds) The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). 17. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 133. 18. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 222. 19. R.A. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Gainesville, University of Florida Monogaphs: Humanities 55, 1984), pp. 29–30. 20. John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. 148. 21. George Lawson, letter to The Times, 9 December 2004. 22. See Anne Rowe, ‘Critical Reception of Jackson’s Dilemma’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 9 (1995): 8–9. 23. Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). 24. Murdoch’s last philosophical work is an uncompleted book on Heidegger, Heidegeger: The Pursuit of Being. The manuscript has been acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and is in the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. 25. T.S Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poetry and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), V, lines 363–4. 26. See Mark Luprecht, ‘Death and Goodness in Bruno’s Dream and “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”’, in Iris Murdoch and Morality.

Chapter 9 Afterlife

1. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘A Distinctive, Magical, Inventive Imagination’, Guardian, 9 February 1999, p. 3. All subsequent comments by Bradbury are taken from this short essay. 2. Peter Conradi, ‘A Witness to Good and Evil’, Guardian, 9 February 1999, p. 18. 3. A.S Byatt and A.N. Wilson, quoted in the Guardian, 9 February 1999, p. 3. 4. Sebastian Faulks, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1999, p. 10. 5. John Updike, Guardian, 9 February 1999, p. 3. 6. Lorna Sage, ‘In Praise of Mess’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1999, p. 12. 7. Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, 10 February 1999. 8. Philip Hensher, ‘The Passionate and the Good’, Spectator, 15 September 2001, p. 35. Notes 187

9. Sebastian Faulks, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1999, p. 10. 10. Lorna Sage, TLS, 19 February 1999, p. 12. 11. See Zadie Smith, ‘Love Actually’, Guardian Review, 1 November 2003, pp. 4–6. See also Anne Rowe, ‘Rembrandt in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’, in Simone Roberts and Alison Scott- Bauman (eds) Iris Murdoch and Moral Imaginations (North Carolina: Macfarland Press, 2010). 12. Ian McEwan, http://ebc.chez.tiscali.fr/ebc81.html, accessed 6 January 2006. See also Anne Rowe, ‘Policemen in a Search Team: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, in IMAR, pp. 148–60. 13. See Frances White ‘ “The world is just a transit camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (Kingston University Press, 2010). White includes chapters on Holocaust Theory and Trauma Theory in her forthcoming PhD thesis, ‘Remorse in the Work of Iris Murdoch’ (Kingston University). 14. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the introduction, ‘Art, Morals and the Discovery of Reality’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–16. 15. It should be said at this point that there is a body of excellent Murdoch criticism that has sidestepped her own objections to theory and recent postmodern approaches to her work suggest that she was attempting to uphold divisions that she could not sustain in practice. The quite deliberate ambiguity and complexity of her novels lend them effortlessly to conflict- ing interpretations which have unconditionally enriched and expanded readings of her work. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, the readings that contest her views have been in part why her work has been revitalized. Now critics like Bran Nicol (in his essay ‘Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010] are extending theorized readings to include a moral dimension. 16. Events include four conferences on Murdoch at Kingston University; in Ankara, Turkey; at the University of Barcelona; and the University of Porto in Portugal. Recent publications include the proceedings of the second international conference on Murdoch in IMAR and Iris Murdoch and Morality; Afaf Jamil Khogeer’s The Integration of Self: Women in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble (New York and Oxford: University Press of America, 2006); Megan Lafferty’s Iris Murdoch’s Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2007). Other publications have been mentioned in passing. This impressive level of research and publications indicates the richness of current Murdoch scholarship worldwide. One of the most significant recent publications on Murdoch is Valerie Purton’s Iris Murdoch: A Chronology, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008, which provides an excellent counterpart to Peter Conradi’s authorized biography. 17. For a fuller discussion of Murdoch’s neo-theology, see Anne Rowe, ‘“The Dream that Does Not Cease to Haunt Us”: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’, in Iris Murdoch and Morality, pp. 1421–55. 188 Notes

18. See Nick Turner, ‘Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon’, in IMAR, pp. 115–23. 19. The Joanna Coles interview, ‘Duet in Perfect Harmony’, Guardian, 21 September 1996, p. 3. All the newspaper articles and essays cited in this chapter are stored in the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. 20. By Professor John Hodges at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. 21. Bayley produced three ‘memoirs’: Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (Elegy for Iris in the USA) (London: Duckworth, 1998), Iris and the Friends (London: Duckworth, 1999) and Widower’s House (London: Duckworth, 2001). 22. Bel Mooney, ‘A Betrayal of Love?’, Daily Mail, 12 September 1998. 23. Carol Sarler, ‘In the Name of Love Shut Up’, Observer, 28 February 1999. 24. Rosalie Osmond, ‘Art, Philosophy and “that Business of Falling in Love”’, The Tablet, 20 October 2001, p. 1496. 25. Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Uncovered’, Daily Mail, 1–5 September 2003. 26. See Frances White, ‘The Good, the Nice and the Ugly’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 18 (2005): 7–14. 27. See Peter J. Conradi, ‘Did Iris Murdoch Draw from Life?’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 15 (Winter 2001): 4–7. Conradi suggests that Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net is drawn from Yorick Smythies and that Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter is drawn from Elias Canetti. See also Valerie Purton, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Art of Dedication’, in the Iris Murdoch Review, 1 (Kingston University Press, 2008): 28–36. Purton teases out links between Murdoch’s characters and the dedicatees of her novels. 28. John Bayley, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 29. A.N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003). Wilson sums up Murdoch’s novels as ‘pretty good tosh’ and her philosophy as ‘just secular sermonizing’. 30. A.N. Wilson, ‘Author Who Shone a Kindly Light on a Godless World’, Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1999, p. 10. 31. See the Daily Mail, 18 August 2003, pp. 40–1. 32. The V&A Purchase Grant Fund contributed £20,000 to the purchase, and £30,000 was given by an anonymous donor. John Bayley and other gen- erous individual donors, the members of the Iris Murdoch Society and Kingston University itself provided the remaining funds. The Centre has since acquired the library from her London flat in Cornwall Gardens, her unpublished book on Heidegger, her notebook on Sartre and the working archives of Peter Conradi. A number of significant letter runs, to Elias Canetti, Sister Marian of Stanbrook Abbey, an American writer, Roly Cochrane, a Canadian teacher and scholar, Scott Dunbar, the painter Barbara Dorf and an Oxford contemporary, Denis Paul, are also in the archives. These letters were purchased with the help of a grant from the Friends of the National Libraries. The archive catalogue can be viewed at http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/Iris-Murdoch/index. shtml. 33. Valerie Purton in Iris Murdoch: A Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) announces that letters are ‘the single most valuable Notes 189

source for any chronology’ (p. xvii) and that the Kingston letters had been invaluable. On 27 June 2009 the collections were featured on BBC Radio 4 on Archives on 4. 34. A number of recent essays, for example by Mark Luprecht and Frances White in Iris Murdoch and Morality, refer to research material acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 35. See Anne Rowe, ‘Those Lives Observed: The Self and the Other in the Letters of Iris Murdoch’, in Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan (eds) The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 202–13. 36. David Morgan, With Love and Rage: Record of a Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston University Press, 2010). 37. The journalist and presenter Bidisha, after visiting the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University, wrote in the Guardian of her delight and surprise at hearing about ‘the new generation of Murdoch students who read Murdoch for the first time and say with awe that the excitement, insight, beauty and depth of it has changed their lives’. Bidisha, quoting Anne Rowe in the Guardian, 29 June 2009. Select Bibliography

Novels by Iris Murdoch

An Accidental Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971). The Bell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958). The Black Prince (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). Bruno’s Dream (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969). A Fairly Honourable Defeat (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956). The Good Apprentice (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985). The Green Knight (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Henry and Cato (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976). The Italian Girl (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964). Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995). The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989). The Nice and the Good (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968). Nuns and Soldiers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980). The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Chatto & Windus 1983). The Red and the Green (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965). The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974). The Sandcastle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). The Sea, The Sea (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978). A Severed Head (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). The Time of the Angels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966). Under the Net (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954). The Unicorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963). An Unofﬁ cial Rose (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). A Word Child (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975).

Novella by Iris Murdoch

‘Something Special’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999).

Philosophy by Iris Murdoch

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Peter Conradi (ed.)) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992).

190 Select Bibliography 191

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987). The Sovereignty of Good (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970).

Short essays by Iris Murdoch

Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (eds)) (Okayama, Japan: University Education Press, 1998).

Plays by Iris Murdoch

Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986). Joanna, Joanna (London: Colophon Press with Old Town Books, 1994). The One Alone (London: Colophon Press with Old Town Books, 1995) (a radio play of this was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 13 February 1987). A Severed Head (with J.B. Priestley) (London: Samuel French, 1964). The Three Arrows with The Servants and the Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).

Poetry by Iris Murdoch

Poems by Iris Murdoch (Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (eds)) (Japan: University Education Press, 1997). A Year of Birds with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone (1984; London: Chatto & Windus, 1991).

Reviews by Iris Murdoch

‘Important Things’. Review of Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, Sunday Times (17 February 1957). Reprinted in Encore: A Sunday Times Anthology (1963): 299–301. ‘Mass, Might and Myth’. Review of Crowds and Power by Elias Cannetti, Spectator CCIX (17 September 1962): 337–8. ‘The Swimmer as Hero’. Review of Haunts of the Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson, New York Review of Books (4 March 1993): 3–4.

Interviews with Iris Murdoch

Blow, Simon, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, Spectator (25 September 1976), pp. 24–5. Bradbury, Malcolm, ‘Iris Murdoch in Conversation’, 27 February 1976. British Council Tape no. RS 2001. Bryden, Ronald (with A.S. Byatt), ‘Talking to Iris Murdoch’, Listener (4 April 1968), pp. 433–4. 192 Select Bibliography

Dooley, Gillian, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2003). Kenyon, Olga (ed.), ‘Iris Murdoch’, in Women Writers Talk (Oxford: Leonard Publishing, 1989), pp. 134–47. Robson, Eric, ‘Iris Murdoch Talks with Eric Robson’, Revelations, Border Television broadcast on Channel 4, 22 April 1984.

Critical works on Iris Murdoch

Altorf, Marije, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (London: Continuum, 2008). Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford University Press, 2000). Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Baldanza, Frank, Iris Murdoch (New York: Twayne, 1974). Begnal, Kate, Iris Murdoch: A Reference Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1987). Bloom, Harold (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Iris Murdoch (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986). Bove, Cheryl, Understanding Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993). Bove, Cheryl and Anne Rowe (eds), The Iris Murdoch News Letter (Bove 1987– 92; Bove and Rowe 1992–2007). See http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/iris- murdoch/newsletter. Bove, Cheryl and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Byatt, A.S., Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965; London: Chatto & Windus, 1965). —— Iris Murdoch (Burnt Hill: Longman Group, 1976). Byatt, A.S., Ignês Sodré and Rebecca Swift (eds), Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995). Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (1986; London: Macmillan, 1989). —— The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: HarperCollins, 2001). —— A Writer at War: Iris Murdoch 1939–45 (London: Short Books, 2010). Dipple, Elizabeth, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1982). Fletcher, John and Cheryl Bove, A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography (New York and London: Garland, 1994). Gerstenberger, Donna, Iris Murdoch (London: Associated University Pressses, 1975). Gordon, David J., Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfi ng (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1995). Griffi n, Gabriele, The Infl uence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). Select Bibliography 193

Grimshaw, Tammy, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005). Hague, Angela, Iris Murdoch’s Comic Vision (Selsinsgrove: Susquehana University Press, 1984). Hardy, Robert, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). Heusel, Barbara Stevens, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995). —— Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception (New York: Camden House, 2001). Johnson, Deborah, Key Women Writers: Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). Kane, Richard C., Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in Modern Fiction (London: Associated University Press, 1988). Khogeer, Afaf (Effat) Jamil, The Integration of the Self: Women in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble (New York and Oxford: University Press of America, 2006). Kırca, Mustafa and Sule Okuroglu (eds), Iris Murdoch and her Work: Critical Essays (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2009). Laverty, Megan, Iris Murdoch’s Ethics (London: Continuum, 2007). Leeson, Miles, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (London: Continuum, 2010). Mettler, Darlene, Sound and Sense: Musical Allusion and Imagery in the Novels of Iris Murdoch (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch for Beginners (New York and London: Writers and Readers, 2001). —— Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (1999; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Phillips, Diana, Agencies of Good in the Work of Iris Murdoch (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991). Rabinovitz, Rubin, Iris Murdoch (London: Columbia University Press, 1968). Ramanathan, Siguna, Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990). Reynolds, Margaret and Jonathan Noakes, Iris Murdoch: The Essential Guide (London: Vintage, 2004). Roberts, Simone and Alison Scott-Bauman (eds), Iris Murdoch and Moral Imaginations (North Carolina: Macfarland Press, 2010). Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). Rowe, Anne (ed.), Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch Review, 1 (Kingston University Press, 2008). Rowe, Anne and Avril Horner (eds), Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Soule, George, Four British Women Novelists: Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym (Lanham and London: Scarecrow Press, 1998). Spear, Hilda D., Modern Novelists: Iris Murdoch (London: Macmillan, 1995), 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 194 Select Bibliography

Todd, Richard, Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearean Interest (London: Vision, 1979). —— Contemporary Writers: Iris Murdoch (London: Methuen, 1984). —— Encounters with Iris Murdoch (Amsterdam, Free University Press, 1988). Tomczak, Anna, Reading Class: Non-verbal Communication as a Reﬂ ection of Middle Class Attitudes and Behaviours in Selected Novels of Iris Murdoch (Bialystok: Bialystok University Press, 2009). Tucker, Lindsay, Critical Essays on Iris Murdoch (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1992). Turner, Nick, Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon (London: Continuum, 2010). Widdows, Heather, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). Wolfe, Peter, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1966).

Biographies/memoirs of Iris Murdoch

Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998). —— Iris and the Friends (London: Duckworth, 1999). Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001). Morgan, David, With Love and Rage: Record of a Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston University Press, 2010). Purton, Valerie, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Wilson, A.N., Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003). Index

Ady, Peter, 36 Beckmann, Max, 120, 121 Aldwinckle, Stella, 34 Best, Marshall, 12, 73 Ali, Monica, 165 Bidisha, 189n Altorf, Marije, 175n Bigsby, Christopher, 182n, 184n Alzheimer’s disease, 59, 158, 162, Biles, Jack I., 183n 168 Binding, Paul, 175n Amis, Kingsley, 13, 14, 174n Bloom, Claire, 71 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 9 Bloom, Harold, 165 Arendt, Hannah, 84 Blow, Simon, 10, 39, 173n, 176n art, 166, 170, 184n, see also Booker Prize, The, 122, 128, 184n visual arts Boulton, Marjorie, 4 Arthurian legends, 152 Bove, Cheryl, 172n, 175n, 180n, Auden, Wystan Hugh, 2 182n Auerbach, Erich, 156, 186n Bowen, Elizabeth, 7 Auerbach, Frank, 180n Bowen, John, 46, 47, 177n Auschwitz, 140 Bradbury, Malcolm, 163, 166, 186n Austen, Jane, 15 Brans, Jo, 185n Emma, 36 Brontë, Charlotte Mansfield Park, 36 Jane Eyre, 62 Sense and Sensibility, 36 Brontë, Emily Ayer, Alfred Jules, 128 Wuthering Heights, 36, 62–3 Bronzino Badminton School, 1, 3–4, 136 Allegory on Venus Cupid, Folly and Baggely, John, 181n Time, 78, 86, 89 Baker, Beatrice May, 4 Brophy, Brigid, 36, 90 Banville, John, 165 Hackenfeller’s Ape, 13 Barrie, James Matthew Bryden, Ronald, 74, 176n, 179n Peter Pan, 112–3 Buber, Martin, 8 Barthes, Roland, 102 Buddhism, 40, 68, 91, 127, 152, Bayley, John, 7, 12, 34, 35, 36, 39, 184n 136, 140, 158, 168–9, 173n, Bunyan, John, 133 177n, 181n, 184n, 188n Burrell, Sheila, 71 Characters of Love, The, 48 Byatt, Antonia Susan, 38, 46, 47, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, 56, 74, 161, 164, 165, 179n, 169–70 183n, 186n Bayley, Michael, 7 Byron, Lord Beckett, Samuel, 28 The Vision of Judgement, 96 Murphy, 15, 23 Waiting for Godot, 14 Calvin, John, 32 Beckman, Christopher, 181n, 184n Calvocoressi, Peter, 46, 177n

195 196 Index

Canetti, Elias, 28, 36, 46, 92, 175n, Dinan, Carolyn, 180n 180n, 184n, 188n Dipple, Elizabeth, 69, 179n Carter, Angela, 164, 165 Dodds, Eric Robertson, 120 Cecil, David, 13, 174n Dorf, Barbara, 188n Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 51, 81, 136, Kingston University, The, 163, 164 170, 172n, 174n, 179n, 186n, The Idiot, 21 189n Drabble, Margaret, 187n Chasen, Heather, 71 Du Maurier, Daphne, 63 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 153, 186n Rebecca, 36 Chevalier, Jean-Louis, 177n, 178n Dunbar, Scott, 188n Christ, 21, 40, 68, 80, 96, 101, 130–1, 132, 136, 151, 161 Eagleton, Terry, 182n Christ-figures, 161–2 Eckhart, 152 Christianity, 34, 40, 68, 81, 91, eco theory, 164, 165 152 Eliot, George, 15, 73, 163, 179n, Clark, Ossie, 77 185n Cochrane, Roly, 136, 179n, 188n Middlemarch, 65, 139–40 Cold War, The, 31 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 8, 11, 83, 84, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 143 173n, 186n Coles, Joanna, 188n Four Quartets, 151 communism, 4–5, 7–9, 80 Waste Land, The, 160 consciousness, 55, 100, 102, 117, Enright, Dennis Joseph, 14 122–4, 126, 127 ‘ethical turn’, the, 167 contingency, 17, 47–8 evil, 61, 82, 84, 86, 93–4, 140, 142 Conquest, Robert, 14, 174n existentialism, 16, 81 Conradi, Peter J., 4, 6, 58, 59, 82, Eyre, Richard, 170 112, 159, 160, 163, 164, 178n, 180n, 183n, 184n, 185n, Faulks, Sebastian, 164, 165, 186n, 186n, 187n, 188n 187n Iris Murdoch: A Life, 169 feminism, 175n Cook, Stanley, 173n Fenner, Rachel, 74, 77 Cornford, Christopher, 77, 78 Fletcher, Tom, 5 Cunningham, Valentine, 182n Foot, Michael Richard Daniell, 5, Cupitt, Don, 152 8, 49 Foot, Philippa, 4, 7, 11, 49, 173n Dante, 106–7 Forster, Tony, 90 David, Gwenda, 11, 12 Foster, William, 10 Davie, Donald, 14 Foucault, Michel, 102 Davies, John, 39 Fowles, John, 165 Deguileville, Guillaume de Fraenkel, Edouard, 4 Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, 153 Frayling, Christopher, 180n Dench, Judi, 170 freedom, 33 Denning, Lord, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 51, 71, 86, 101, Derrida, Jacques, 135 127, 142, 146 Dickens, Charles, 15, 73, 136 Froebel School, 3 Index 197

Gadda, Carlo Emilia, 73 Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 178n Gainsborough, Thomas, 44, 78 Hulluh, Paul, 172n Gerstenberger, Donna, 69, 179n Hume, David, 122 Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm, 73 incest, 49, 52, 68, 178–9n Gifford Lectures, the, 135 intertextuality, 151–3 God, 10, 40, 44, 79–80, 82, 83, 88, Ireland, 3, 58–61, 179n 91, 96, 152, 167 Iris (film), 170 Goff, Martin, 178n Irish Republican Army, 70, 109 good, the, 44, 87–8, 117, 143 Iris Murdoch Archives, see Centre gothic, the, 57, 61–2, 65, 72, 164, for Iris Murdoch Studies, 165, 178n Kingston University Greene, Graham, 8, 118 Iris Murdoch Society, The, 170, Brighton Rock, 60 184n, 188n Griffin, Gabrielle, 173n Islam, 147 Grimshaw, Tammy, 173n, 175n, 180n, 185n James, Henry, 7, 8, 37, 53, 71, 78, Gunn, Thom, 14 117, 128, 129, 136, 165, 176n, 177n, 179n, 185n Hale, Sheila, 184n Golden Bowl, The, 36, 55, 73 Hammond, Annie, 172n Portrait of a Lady, The, 30, 54 Hammond, Richard, 172n Roderick Hudson, 54 Hansford Johnson, Pamela, 8 Wings of the Dove, The, 128–9, 151 Hardy, Robert, 71 Janeway, Elizabeth, 73 Hart, Josephine, 136 Jennings, Elizabeth, 14 Hartley, Leslie Poles Jenson, Meg, 189n Go-Between, The, 59 Johnson, Deborah, 175n Hayman, Eric, 173n Jordan, Jane, 189n Heidegger, Martin, 135, 159, 186n Joyce, James, 7, 60, 65, 73 Being and Time, 79 Dubliners, 60 Hensher, Philip, 164, 186n Ulysses, 65 Herbert, Hugh, 109 Julian of Norwich, 46, 130, 151 Hicks, David, 7, 8, 16, 34, 174n Hitler, Adolf, 83, 143 Kant, Immanuel, 90, 122 Hockney, David, 77, 180n Keeler, Christine, 75 Hodges, John, 188n Khogeer, Afaf Jamil, 187n Hollinghurst, Alan, 165 Kierkegaard, Søren, 8 Holocaust, 40, 166, 187n Kipling, Rudyard, 136 Holocaust Theory, see Holocaust Klatschko, Lucy (Sister Marian), Homer 188n Iliad, 120, 147 Kokoschka, Oskar, 165 Odyssey, 119–20 Kreisel, Georg, 9 homosexuality, 42, 45, 164, 176n Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 140 Hope-Wallace, Philip, 71 Horace, 1 language, 18–19, 123 Horner, Avril, 61, 178n Lankester, Tim, 98 198 Index

La Princesse de Clèves, 63 Moroya, Yozo, 172n Larkin, Philip, 14 Motesiczky, Marie Louise, 180n Lascelles, Mary, 4, 172n Murdoch, Iris Lawrence, David Herbert, 73 Accidental Man, An, 96–9, 100, Lawrence, Thomas Edward, 8 133, 163, 183n Lawson, George, 158, 186n contingency, 96–7, 98, 99 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 14 politics, 98 Lessing, Doris, 165 ‘Against Dryness’, 11, 17, 47, 48, Lloyd, A. C, 11 49, 173n Lodge, David, 164 ‘Agamemnon Class 1939’, 6 logical positivism, 93 ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, Lord, Stephen, 85 177n love, 21, 22, 41, 48–9, 88–9, 91, 100, Bell, The, 7, 35, 39–46, 50, 51, 76, 107 78, 80, 151 Lovibond, Sabina, 175n critical response, 46 Luprecht, Mark, 181n, 186n, 189n good, the, 44 Luxemburg, Rosa, 29, 175n homosexuality, 42, 45 love, 41 McCurdy, Michael, 178n saint/artist dialectic, 45 McEwan, Ian, 165, 182n, 187n sermons, 41–3, 176n MacKinnon, Donald, 4, 8, 169 Shakespearean allusions, 45 McWilliam, Candia, 165 transcendence, 44 Magee, Brian, 56, 176n Black Prince, The, 7, 21, 99–105, magic, 93, 128, 140 116, 136, 137, 146, 151 Mallarmé, 7 love, 100 Mann, Thomas, 166 metafiction, 102 Marcel, Gabriel, 17, 77 Shakespearean allusions, 104 Marsh, Leonie, 5 suffering, 101 Martin, Priscilla, 172n, 173n, 177n, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in, 179n, 180n, 181n, 183n, 101 185n, 188n wins James Tait Memorial Prize, Marxism, 147–8 99 Marx, Karl, 80 Black Prince, The (play), 100, 136, Matthias, William, 99 181–2n Mattisse, Henri, 165 Book and the Brotherhood, The, 5, metafiction, 102 76, 146, 147–9 Mettler, Darlene, 181n Marxism, 147, 148 Meyers, Jeffrey, 174n terrorism, 147 Midgley, Mary, 4, 172n, 173n, Bruno’s Dream, 74, 89–91, 179n 162, 163 Milsom, Toby, 85 Buddhism, 91 Momigliano, Arnold, 36 death, 90–1 Mooney, Bel, 188n ‘Existentialist Hero, The’, 174n, morality, 50–1, 79, 81 182n Morgan, David, 75, 77, 171, 180n, ‘Existential Political Myth, The’, 183n, 189n 11 Index 199

‘Existentialists and Mystics’, 182n Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Existentialists and Mystics, 184n 40, 44, 56, 80, 120, 122, 135, Fairly Honourable Defeat, A, 7, 9, 148, 152, 153, 156, 184n 23, 26, 28, 42, 45, 76, 78, ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker’, 172n 92–6, 139, 142, 151 ‘Moral Decision About allegorical structure, 92 Homosexuality, The’, 176n evil, 93–4 Nice and the Good, The, 42, 74, freedom, 95 75, 76, 79, 83–9, 163, 178n, philosopher characters, 10 184n ‘Fire and the Sun, The’, 49 Bronzino’s Allegory on Venus Flight from the Enchanter, The, 7, Cupid Folly and Time in, 78, 28–34, 42, 45, 50, 76 86, 89 Cold War, 31 goodness, 87–8 freedom, 33 refugee characters, 9 politics, 29–30 sexual freedom, 85 power, 29–30, 32 ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, 11 refugee characters, 9, 28 ‘Novelist as Metaphysician, The’, religion, 34 174n saint/artist dialectic, 30 Nuns and Soldiers, 59, 65, 78, Good Apprentice, The, 22, 78, 128–34, 151, 185n 140–6, 152 Christ, 130–2 evil, 140, 142–4 One Alone, The, 73, 99, 181n goodness, 143 ‘On “God” and “Good”’, 91, 156 suffering, 141, 144–5 Philosopher’s Pupil, The, 58, 70, 76, Green Knight, The, 42, 78, 151, 136–40 152, 154–8, 160, 185n goodness, 139 medieval influences, 155–6 narrator, 137 myth, 155 Shakespearean allusions, 138 Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being, ‘Phoenix-Hearted, The’, 2–3 186n, 188n Red and the Green, The, 60, 61, Henry and Cato, 60, 76, 78, 65–70, 72, 76, 120, 156 117–22, 133, 184n Ireland, 57, 65–6, 68–70 Titian’s Death of Actaeon, 120 saint/artist dialectic, 65, 68 ‘Irish, are they Human, The’, 172n Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Italian Girl, The, 72–3, 78 The, 78, 105–7, 109, 116, 133, Freudian narrative, 72 150, 160, 163, 183n gothic, the, 72 love, 107 Italian Girl, The (play), 72, 179n Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, Jackson’s Dilemma, 158–62, 172n 106 Alzheimer’s effect on, 158, 162 wins Whitbread Literary Award Jerusalem, 46 for Fiction, 182n Joanna, Joanna, 73, 92, 179n, ‘Salvation by Words’, 157 181n Sandcastle, The, 35, 36–9, 50, 51, Message to the Planet, The, 60, 76, 76, 176n 78, 138, 146, 147, 149–51 experimental style, 38–9 Shakespearean allusions, 150 marriage, 37 200 Index

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 15, 16, religion, 27 17, 172n, 174n saint/artist dialectic, 18, 24 Sea, The Sea, The, 7, 48, 115, war, 27 122–8, 133, 136, 152, 175n, Unicorn, The, 60, 61–5, 68, 70, 72, 184n 76, 151, 162, 182n consciousness, 122–4, 126–7 gothic, the, 61–2, 65 language, 123 Ireland, 57, 61–2 obsession, 124 Unofficial Rose, An, 7, 42, 53–6, 67, wins Booker Prize, 122, 128 78, 120 Servants and the Snow, The, 73, 99 consciousness, 54–5 Severed Head, A, 13, 45, 49–53, 71, critical response, 56 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 84, 174n experimental style, 57 incest, 49 influence of Henry James on, Irish characters, 59 54–5 London, 8 love, 53 psychoanalysis, 51–2 saint/artist dialectic, 53, 142 satire, 50 Tintoretto painting in, 54–6 Severed Head, A (play), 71–2, Word Child, A, 3, 7, 76, 107–16, 179n 133, 183n Severed Head, A, (film), 71–2 class tensions, 112–4 ‘Something Special’, 57, 60–1, education system, 108 178n Peter Pan, 109, 112–15 ‘Sovereignty of Good, The’, 44, Year of Birds, A, 181n 80, 81, 93 music, 181n ‘Thinking and Language’, 123 ‘Three Arrows, The’, 73 National Gallery, The, 44, 48, 86, Time of the Angels, The, 48, 74, 76, 89, 120 79–83, 84, 88, 115, 156, 163 ‘negative capability’, 103–4 evil, 93 ‘neo-theology’, 8, 40, 79, 80, 167 London, 8 ‘new criticism’, 14, 174n morality, 81 Newman, Paul, 181n secularity, 51, 79, 80, 82 Nicodemus, 8 Under the Net, 4, 9, 11, 15–29, 30, Nicol, Bran, 178n, 182n, 184n, 187n 31, 32, 33, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40 50, 60, 68, 71, 76, 139, 151, 156, 163, 172n, 184n, 187n Osborn, Pamela, 173n, 180n epigraph, 27, 146 Osbourne, John, 14 existentialism, 16 Osmond, Rosalie, 188n Irish characters, 23, 59–60 language, 17–9 paintings, see visual arts London, 3 Paisley, Ian, 179n love, 20–2 Parsons, Ian, 13, 173n, 178n open ending, 25–6 Pears, David, 36 Plato’s myth of the cave, 20 Peter Pan, 109, 112–16, 141, 183n politics, 29 Phaedrus, 62 realism, 23 Phillips, Tom, 185n Index 201

Plato, 10, 20, 41, 80, 82, 88, 93, Chemins de la Liberté, Les, 16 106–7, 127, 160, 173n, 174n, Nausée, La, 16, 26, 88 184n Saunders, James, 72 Symposium, 21, 64 Schlenker, Ines, 180n Pliatsky, Leo, 5 Scholes, Robert, 151, 186n poetry, 1, 2–3, 6, 71 Schweiker, William, 173n, 180n politics, 29–30 Scott, Winnie, 13 postmodernism, 102, 167 Scott-Bauman, Alison, 187n post-structuralism, 102, 167 Shakespeare, William, 7, 45–6, 74, Priestley, John Boynton, 71 84, 86–7, 92–3, 104, 117, 123, Profumo, John, 75, 85 150–2, 157, 164, 174n, 184n Proust, Marcel, 7 As You Like It, 45, 87, 159 À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 59, Comedy of Errors, The, 46 145 Hamlet, 104, 128–9 psychoanalysis, 51–2, 104 King Lear, 93, 150 Purton, Valerie, 172n, 175n, 181n, Merchant of Venice, The, 87 185n, 187n, 188n Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 22, 45 Pushkin, Alexander, 8 Much Ado About Nothing, 46, 93 Othello, 93 Queneau, Raymond, 28, 174n ‘Sonnet XX’, 45 Pierrot Mon Ami, 9, 15 Tempest, The, 45, 93, 123, 136, 138, 150 Ramanathan, Suguna, 172n, 185n Twelfth Night, 46, 87 Ramsey, Peggy, 92, 179n Winter’s Tale, The, 129 religion, see Christianity, Islam Shields, Carol, 165 Rembrandt, 187n Shoaf, R. A, 186n Riley, Bridget, 77 Simopoulos, John, 36 Rimbaud, Arthur, 15 ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Roberts, Simone, 187n 151–8, 183n, 186n Robinson, John, 179n Sizemore, Christine, 175n Honest to God, 73, 80 Slaymaker, William, 140, 185n Robson, Eric, 136 Smallwood, Norah, 12, 13, 39, 50, Rose, Jacqueline, 183n 71, 73, 128, 173n, 176n, Rose, W. K., 74, 98, 176n, 181n 177n, 179n Rowe, Anne, 172n, 175n, 176n, Smith, Zadie, 165, 187n 178n, 180n, 182n, 183n, Smolenska Greenwood, Maria, 185n, 189n 185n Royal College of Art, 75, 77, 78, 83, Smythies, Yorick, 9, 188n 171 Solomon, Harold, 51 Ryle, Gilbert, 11 Spark, Muriel, 8 Spear, Hilda, 66, 178n, 184n Sage, Lorna, 164, 165, 186n, 187n Spender, Natasha, 129, 185n Samson, Frederic, 78 Spender, Stephen, 129, 185n Sarler, Carol, 169, 188n Ste Croix, Carolyn, 89–90 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15–17, 28, 55, 77, Stendhal, 184n 166, 188n Stone, Janet, 181n 202 Index

Stone, Reynolds, 172n, 181n Wagner, Richard, 177n suffering, 28, 63–4, 68, 91, 101, 120, Wain, John, 14 122, 141, 143–4, 145, 148–9, Warner, Marina, 165 162 Warnock, Mary, 175n Sullivan, Zoreh T., 178n Weil, Simone, 9, 16, 28, 29, 152, 173n, 175n Thompson, Edward Palmer, 5 White, Frances, 166, 175n, 187n, Thompson, Frank, 5, 6, 8, 90 188n, 189n Tillich, Paul, 80, 176n White, Patrick, 173n Tintoretto, 54–6, 78 Williamson, Malcolm, 181n Titian, 120, 121, 125, 184n, 185n Wilson, Andrew Norman, 58, 59, 70, Flaying of Marsyas, The, 101, 136 164, 165, 170, 177n, 186n, Perseus and Andromeda, 125 188n Sacred and Profane Love, 106 Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her, 170 Todd, Richard, 45, 177n, 182n, 184n Wilson, Angus, 47 Tolstoy, Leo, 73 Wilson, Harold, 71 tragedy, 93, 119, 156–7 Wind, Edgar, 107, 182n, 183n transcendence, 44 Winslet, Kate, 170 Turner, Jane, 159 Winsor, Dorothy A., 178n Turner, Nick, 168, 188n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 16, 19, 40, Turner, William, 94 174n Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 18 United Nations Relief and Woodward, Joanna, 181n Rehabilitation Administration Woolf, Cecil, 181n (UNRRA), 8, 9, 28, 55 Woolf, Virginia, 7 Updike, John, 164, 186n To The Lighthouse, 59 Ustinov, Peter, 181n Waves, The, 148 Wordsworth, William, 173n Vaughan Williams, Alun, 99 Wullschlager, Jackie, 186n Vietnam War, 98 Virgil, 30 Yeats, William Butler, 3, 172n, 178n, visual arts, 44, 48, 54–6, 78, 86, 89, 179n 101, 106, 120, 146 ‘Easter 1916’, 66, 69