Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
The Pleasure of Iris Murdoch
By Stuart Hampshire
Iris Murdoch: A Life
by Peter J. Conradi
Norton, 706 pp., $35.00
Peter Conradi's biography is an immensely long book, and it sometimes seems long as one reads it. The trouble is that the biographer has been almost smothered by the abundance of his sources. Iris Murdoch often thought of her own life as a kind of quest, a quest for perfection in her experience and in herself, and in consequence all through the years she kept diaries to record her aspirations and shortcomings. Ninety-five diaries survive. She was a person always greatly liked and loved, and tirelessly wrote long and serious letters to all her friends. Add to this twenty-six novels and some philosophical and reflective essays, and it becomes evident that Peter Conradi had a formidable problem, which he has been partly, but only partly, successful in solving. He admires Murdoch with some reservation, and the generous tone of his writing helps the reader to overlook a certain formlessness in the narrative and some vagueness in the grounds of his admiration.
Review, 3261 words
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