Life
Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down, in Northern Ireland. Her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as a singer before Iris was born, was from a middle class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Hughes Murdoch, a civil servant, enlisted as a soldier in King Edward's Horse in 1915 and served in France during World War 1 before being promoted to Second lieutenant. Iris Murdoch's parents first met in Dublin when he was on leave, and were married in 1918 . Iris was the couple's only child. When she was a few weeks old the family moved to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second class clerk.
She was educated in private progressive schools, entering the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925, and attending Badminton School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. She went to Somerville College, Oxford in 1938 with the intention of studying English, but switched to Classics. At Oxford she studied philosophy with Donald M. MacKinnon and attended Eduard Fraenkel's seminars on Agamemnon. She was awarded a First Class Honours degree in 1942. After leaving Oxford she went to work in London for HM Treasury. In June 1944 she left the Treasury and went to work for the UNRRA. At first she was stationed in London at the agency's European Regional Office. In 1945 she was transferred first to Brussels, then to Innsbruck, and finally to Graz, Austria, where she worked in a refugee camp. She left the UNRRA in 1946.
She studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. She received Honorary Degrees from the University of Bath (DLitt,1983), University of Cambridge (1993) and Kingston University (1994).
She wrote her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954, having previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. It was at Oxford in 1956 that she met and married John Bayley, later to be a professor of English literature and also a novelist. She went on to produce 25 more novels and other works of philosophy and drama until 1995, when she began to suffer the early effects of Alzheimer's disease, the symptoms of which she at first attributed to writer's block. She died, aged 79, in 1999, and her ashes were scattered in the garden at the Oxford Crematorium.
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“The train was crammed, the heat stifling. We feel out of sorts, but do not quite know if we are hungry or drowsy. But when we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks, and the American instruments will make music in the merry cafe described by our friend Lange. And then, sometime later, we die.”
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“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
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“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)