Iris Murdoch

A strange relationship is established with favorite novelists, particularly those who are our living contemporaries. In reading their work, we are reconstituting word by word their mental landscapes and experiencing the energy which has gone into the act of creation, thereby establishing an extraordinary sort of intimacy. Although it should work the same way with deceased authors, the relationship lacks the reassurance that they are safely off somewhere, working on their next book. Since these authors no longer inhabit our present reality, their fiction inexorably turns into historical fiction. When we have turned their last page, there is nothing beyond.

This February, Iris Murdoch will have been dead for ten years. For those of us who remember waiting anxiously for her new novels to appear—at the typical rate of one every year or two--that seems especially hard to believe. That sturdy, striking face from the book jacket photographs—with eyes that, if you stared long enough, seemed to puncture holes in you—suggested that mortality would never be an issue. Although hers was one of the most reliable literary voices throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, it was remarkable to discover, shortly after her death, that most of her monumental output (26 novels) was no longer in print. In our ever-accelerating information age, new books are kept on bookstore shelves for ever-decreasing amounts of time and allowed to go out of print with no apparent qualm on the part of publishers. It was gratifying to find, however, that over the last few years Murdoch seems to have emerged once again in paperback; but I wonder if she isn’t nowadays more remembered than read, due to the memoir of her final days by her husband, John Bayley; the Peter J. Conradi biography Iris: A Life; and Iris, the movie of her life with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench.  read more »