Abstract

Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 was published in 2015 and includes over 700 of Iris Murdoch’s personal letters to friends, colleagues, lovers, students and public figures. Her letters not only provide a unique insight into the synthesis between Murdoch’s life and art but also raise troubling questions about the legitimacy of personal revelations and their relevance, if any, to her philosophy and novels. Early reviews in the UK identified Murdoch as ‘dishonest’, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘morally bogus’ and this essay ponders the dubious bargain all artists make between morality and exploring the depths of human experience that render their art truthful. It suggests that Murdoch’s personal letters poignantly illustrate how out of step she was with the bourgeois society in which she lived, and that they illustrate not only the extraordinary complexity of her personality, but also how her philosophy and fiction were forged out of her own visceral life experiences. Fresh autobiographical information reconfigures Iris Murdoch’s fiction as more radical and ambiguous than has previously been understood. Quite different interpretations of the tragedies at the heart of her novels emerge when they are considered in the light of recent research on gender fluidity and sexual freedoms. Murdoch’s novels are more at home and more relevant, it seems, to the redefinitions of gender that characterize the twenty-first century than the confines of the century in which she lived and wrote.