She finished her second draft on 28 March 1953, convinced at this point that it was romantic, sentimental, and bad, and gave it to Elias Canetti
to read. It was submitted to two successive publishers,...
Education
Iris Murdoch
In Brussels, while working for UNRRA
, IM
first encountered existentialist philosophy, which was to have a profound effect on her life and work. She met Sartre
in 1945. At a slightly later stage...
Friends, Associates
Iris Murdoch
IM
's friends stood very close to the centre of her life. Many of her friendships were eroticized; it is hard or impossible to divide her lovers from her friends. It was of both kinds...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Publishing
Iris Murdoch
Publisher John Lehmann
rejected IM
's translation of Raymond Queneau
's existentialist novel Pierrot mon ami, which she had been working on since the spring.
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins, 2002.
232
Textual Features
Iris Murdoch
This celebration of postwar modernity has as epigraph Dryden
's welcome to a new century: 'Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new.
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch. A Life. HarperCollins, 2002.