On this date in 1919, Iris Murdoch, the daughter of an Irish woman who trained as a singer and an English civil servant, was born in Dublin. Iris as a child moved with her family to the suburbs of London. The prolific writer of 26 novels was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and became a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1949.
Her first book was nonfiction: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). Her first novel was Under the Net (1954). A Severed Head (1961) was made into a film in 1971. The Bell (1958) was about the Anglican religious community. Her book The Time of Angels (1956) depicted a highly flawed Anglican priest. The Sea, The Sea (1978) won the Booker Prize.
For a self-described atheist, Murdoch had a somewhat confusing view of religion. The New Economist reported on Sept. 25, 1995, that one of her concerns “has been religion and its role in the modern world. She herself does not believe in God and, in the specific case of Christianity of the more orthodox sort, has a problem with the picture of God as a person up in Heaven, and Christ as his son, a magical, spiritual being.” (Cited in Who’s Who in Hell, ed. Warren Allen Smith.)
Murdoch was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1987. Her death from Alzheimer’s disease was documented in Elegy of Iris, and A Memoir of Iris Murdoch by her husband John Bayley. The movie “Iris,” starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as the author, was made in 2001. D. 1999.
