Iris Murdoch

Born on July 15, 1919, in Phibsborough, Dublin, Jean Iris Murdoch moved to London as an infant when her father, a civil servant, joined the Ministry of Health. She was educated at the Badminton School in Bristol and went up to Somerville College, Oxford, in 1938, intending to read English but switching to Greats, the rigorous course combining classics, ancient history, and philosophy, and taking a first-class degree in 1942. She worked at the Treasury during the war, then joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working in refugee camps in Belgium and Austria. From 1947 to 1948 she studied philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she briefly encountered Wittgenstein. She became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1948 and taught philosophy there for fifteen years. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), was later named one of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Over the next four decades she published twenty-six novels, including The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), and The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize. Her philosophical work The Sovereignty of Good (1970) argued for the reality of moral perception against the prevailing currents of analytic philosophy. She was made a Dame in 1987. In 1997 she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She died on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, after forty-three years of marriage to the literary critic John Bayley.

In 1939, Murdoch fell into her first love, with a fellow Oxford classicist named Frank Thompson. War called him away before it could become more than letters. He was parachuted into Bulgaria to fight beside partisans, then executed by firing squad in 1944, aged twenty-four.