Living on Paper
Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Publisher Description
EDITED BY AVRIL HORNER AND ANNE ROWE
‘Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut’
This collection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and revealing letters gives us a living portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch grappling with philosophical questions, as well as feeling her anguish when a novel obstinately refuses to come together.
They uncover Murdoch’s famed personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its intriguing complexity, and her penchant for living beyond the bounds of social acceptability. We also begin to see the 'real life material' that fed into her fiction, despite her claims that her fiction never drew on reality. Above all we see the accumulation of life – intimate, irreverent, fiercely engaged with the world – in this extraordinary collection of letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and philosopher Murdoch was a dedicated correspondent, as this hefty collection attests. Spanning six decades, and encompassing dozens of recipients, this collection of her letters provide a lens through which to view many events in her life: membership in the Communist party while a student at Oxford in the 1930s; her embrace of existentialism in the post-WWII years; the publication of her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954; her marriage to fellow novelist John Bayley in 1956. The letters touch on many weighty intellectual topics, and they are equally remarkable for their candor for instance, while a postgraduate at Oxford in 1948, she writes, "I find myself feeling much solider, slower, warmer, more imaginative and less spirituelle than most of the people around me." Regarding her writing, 10 years later: "I just have a ghastly conviction of second-rateness and no notion of how to get up from where I am." Murdoch died in 1999 from complications of Alzheimer's, a disease that she knew was taking its toll on her writing, and the last line of the final letter included here "Please forgive all this stumbling" is a poignant postscript to the life of the mind recounted in these engrossing and frequently moving letters.
