Iris Murdoch - an enigma, brilliant writer and existential thinker.
Iris Murdoch - an enigma, brilliant writer and existential thinker. There are few authors in the twentieth century who could write with the precision of a Trollope, intensity of Dostoevsky, flair and peerless prose of Dickens, eye for detail as Proust, philosophic temper of a Camus and with an authoritative feminine voice of Austen - as Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), the grand lady of Literary fiction. She along with Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood have remained on the top of my list of great female writers. I have read and reread all their books many times over; and like scripture, each time I read they bring forth a fresh interpretation, a delectable new angle to writing and a deep ever renewing undercurrent of social, moral and individual issues that any story about human predicament and its paradoxes should sustain and project. This essay and review is about the Iris Murdoch and her extraordinary literary and personal life. Iris, an Irish by birth, grew up during a ti