Living on Paper
Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years
Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has been Murdoch's own voice—her life in her own words. Living on Paper—the first major collection of Murdoch's most compelling and interesting personal letters—gives, for the first time, a rounded self-portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. With more than 760 letters, fewer than forty of which have been published before, the book provides a unique chronicle of Murdoch's life from her days as a schoolgirl to her last years. The result is the most important book about Murdoch in more than a decade.
The letters show a great mind at work—struggling with philosophical problems, trying to bring a difficult novel together, exploring spirituality, and responding pointedly to world events. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity, especially in letters to lovers or close friends, such as the writers Brigid Brophy, Elias Canetti, and Raymond Queneau, philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Philippa Foot, and mathematician Georg Kreisel. We witness Murdoch's emotional hunger, her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable, and her irreverence and sharp sense of humor. We also learn how her private life fed into the plots and characters of her novels, despite her claims that they were not drawn from reality.
Direct and intimate, these letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person, making for an extraordinary reading experience.
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.
