Peter Conradi is literary executor of the estate of Iris Murdoch (1919-99) and was her close friend in the 1980s and '90s, so sensible readers will not expect this to be a warts-and-all biography of the distinguished novelist and philosopher. What they get instead is a warm, appreciative portrait focused on Murdoch's formative years: happy Anglo-Irish childhood; intellectual fulfillment at Oxford University, where she joined the Communist Party and formed many enduring friendships; a stint in the civil service and work with refugees during World War II; and the postwar decade, when she began to write the intellectually challenging yet wickedly entertaining novels that made her reputation. John Bayley movingly described his wife's struggle with Alzheimer's disease in Elegy for Iris, and Conradi wisely does not reiterate that material. He concentrates on recapturing the intense young woman who awed fellow students with her brains and enticed men with her blonde hair and generous figure, yet kept everyone at a slight distance, finding epistolary relationships more manageable than the tangled sexual intrigues her fiction explores so acutely. She had many affairs, including a painful one with expatriate (and married) European intellectual Elias Canetti, but marriage to Bayley in 1956 gave her the stability she needed; over the next 40 years she produced 25 steadily more assured and provocative novels, from Under the Net through A Severed Head and The Black Prince to The Green Knight. Conradi uses interviews and Murdoch's journals to good effect in a lengthy but readable text that illuminates the personal experiences that so intimately informed her fiction. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
It has been nearly two years since Iris Murdoch's death from Alzheimer's and the publication of her husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris. It seems fitting that the beloved philosopher and novelist should be the subject of a biography nearly as idiosyncratic and charming as she herself was. One of the numerous oddities of this one is its construction: each chapter is broken into numbered sections rarely more than four pages long. This allows the author (Murdoch's longtime friend and biographer of Angus Wilson) to ramble back and forth chronologically, examining a few years at a time through different perspectives literary, romantic, philosophical and gradually progress forward. The overall effect is leisurely, informal, highly literary and more than a bit uneven. In the first half, Conradi faithfully traces Murdoch's family background and intellectual development, painstakingly tracking down her earliest Latin teachers or the history of modern Irish sectarianism, as the moment requires. But the second half ends as if winded, streaking through 16 prolific years in one short chapter, mentioning Murdoch's knighthood almost in passing. The book's great strength lies in its characterizations ("She had a way of staring down at her glass, listening very carefully to the speaker, possibly indicating also that the glass was empty"). Documenting Murdoch's eccentricities and legendary kindnesses, Conradi succeeds in reviving her presence. Thus, readers who seek a few last glimpses of Murdoch's rare personality will be gratified by this affectionate, if disorganized, tribute; those looking for closure or hoping to make sense of the narrative of her life will not. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Conradi, the literary executor of Iris Murdoch's (1919-99) estate, presents a richly textured study of her personal, professional, academic, and literary life. A well-loved only child who dove headlong and with open heart into the excellent liberal education she was offered in adolescence and then at Oxford, Murdoch saw "philosophical problems [as] the problems of [her] own life" even as she worked through the Classics to Kant to the newborn ideas of Existentialism and beyond. It was through fiction, however, that she worked to discern most clearly for herself and display for her readers how the moral life is to be lived. For that feat, William Golding praised her work for the access it gives readers into the 20th century itself, giving "it back to us as myth" after examining its actuality, and, most particularly, its nuanced and troubled contest with the Good. Conradi offers sensual and intellectual details about every aspect of his subject, including her developing sense of both self and the absoluteness of Kant's moral imperative. Rich footnoting leads the reader to expansions on the narrative as well as to the authority behind the biographer's statements. Scholars need this text, but it will also intrigue lay readers, especially those who enjoyed John Bayley's Elegy for Iris (LJ 12/98). (Photos and index not seen.) Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Novelist and philosopher Murdoch's final years, dimmed by Alzheimer's, were lovingly, daringly chronicled by her husband, John Bayley, in deeply personal testimony that makes Conradi's fluidly interpretational biography all the more welcome for its broader view. Murdoch's literary executor and the author of biographies of Dostoyevsky and Angus Wilson, Conradi explores Murdoch's life in involving detail. An adored only child, she "began writing stories at nine in order to provide herself with imaginary siblings," and she kept writing all through her years at Oxford, Cambridge, and beyond as she chronicled and fictionalized her life's quest to understand goodness in a century Conradi labels "appalling." Steeped in Murdoch's numerous diaries, novels (26), and philosophical writings, Conradi conveys with great aplomb her remarkable magnetism, kindness, genius, and sense of wonder, making palpable the sense that she was, as many attest, a magical being. He unravels her intense and complicated romances, which were as much about art and power as about sexual attraction and love, and explicates the moral questions she grappled with as World War II shattered faith and reason. Conradi's infectious fascination with Murdoch and stirring insights into her work make this a superb cornerstone biography. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


About the Author
Peter Conradi is the author of the biographies Angus Wilson and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is the literary executor of the Murdoch estate.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Iris Murdoch's life - like her books - was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, 'it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters,' and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself 'must not distinguish between me and my work'. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation; but much that was thought to be romance in her work turns out to be reality. 'Real life is so much odder than any book,' she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960s, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distancce and by letter, and the Buddhist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity.

SYNOPSIS

English novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is best known as the author of The Sea, The Sea. This biography focuses on her intellectual development at Oxford, her experimentation with Communism, and her work in the Austrian refugee camps during World War II. Conradi (emeritus, English, U. of Kingston) is the literary executor of Murdoch's estate. The volume contains two sections of black and white photographs.

Annotation © Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post Book World

Fun stuff. The emphasis, properly, is on her work.

Publishers Weekly

It has been nearly two years since Iris Murdoch's death from Alzheimer's and the publication of her husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris. It seems fitting that the beloved philosopher and novelist should be the subject of a biography nearly as idiosyncratic and charming as she herself was. One of the numerous oddities of this one is its construction: each chapter is broken into numbered sections rarely more than four pages long. This allows the author (Murdoch's longtime friend and biographer of Angus Wilson) to ramble back and forth chronologically, examining a few years at a time through different perspectives literary, romantic, philosophical and gradually progress forward. The overall effect is leisurely, informal, highly literary and more than a bit uneven. In the first half, Conradi faithfully traces Murdoch's family background and intellectual development, painstakingly tracking down her earliest Latin teachers or the history of modern Irish sectarianism, as the moment requires. But the second half ends as if winded, streaking through 16 prolific years in one short chapter, mentioning Murdoch's knighthood almost in passing. The book's great strength lies in its characterizations ("She had a way of staring down at her glass, listening very carefully to the speaker, possibly indicating also that the glass was empty"). Documenting Murdoch's eccentricities and legendary kindnesses, Conradi succeeds in reviving her presence. Thus, readers who seek a few last glimpses of Murdoch's rare personality will be gratified by this affectionate, if disorganized, tribute; those looking for closure or hoping to make sense of the narrative of her life will not. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 CahnersBusiness Information.

Library Journal

Conradi, the literary executor of Iris Murdoch's (1919-99) estate, presents a richly textured study of her personal, professional, academic, and literary life. A well-loved only child who dove headlong and with open heart into the excellent liberal education she was offered in adolescence and then at Oxford, Murdoch saw "philosophical problems [as] the problems of [her] own life" even as she worked through the Classics to Kant to the newborn ideas of Existentialism and beyond. It was through fiction, however, that she worked to discern most clearly for herself and display for her readers how the moral life is to be lived. For that feat, William Golding praised her work for the access it gives readers into the 20th century itself, giving "it back to us as myth" after examining its actuality, and, most particularly, its nuanced and troubled contest with the Good. Conradi offers sensual and intellectual details about every aspect of his subject, including her developing sense of both self and the absoluteness of Kant's moral imperative. Rich footnoting leads the reader to expansions on the narrative as well as to the authority behind the biographer's statements. Scholars need this text, but it will also intrigue lay readers, especially those who enjoyed John Bayley's Elegy for Iris (LJ 12/98). (Photos and index not seen.) Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews