The Saint and Artist

Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi’s acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley.

‘Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century’s most remarkable novelists and thinkers.’ John Bayley

Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including ‘The Bell’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’, ‘The Black Prince’ and the Booker Prize-winning ‘The Sea, The Sea’.

In ‘The Saint and the Artist’, the only full critical examination of Murdoch’s work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.

Reviews

‘Brilliant.’ New York Times Book Review

‘This excellent and distinguished book had considerable influence on my own thinking.’ Malcolm Bradbury

‘In my view, the best work on her novels and thought now in print. Conradi reads her novels both wisely and attentively, and ranges widely round them; his study of her Platonism is both just and rigorous.’ A.S. Byatt

‘A valuable study. Conradi has a lively, curious, energetic mind and his enthusiasm for his subject is warming.’ Studies in the Novel

About the author

Peter Conradi is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. His previous publications include studies of the work of John Fowles, Dostoevsky and Angus Wilson. He edited Iris Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Literature and Philosophy (1997).