Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Iris Murdoch
-
Standard Name: Murdoch, Iris
Birth Name: Jean Iris Murdoch
Married Name: Jean Iris Bailey
IM
, active from the second world war till almost the end of the twentieth century, was best known as a philosophical novelist with a wild sense of comedy. Her twenty-six novels foreground philosophic issues similar to those discussed in her well-regarded academic publications. She contributed to many periodicals, and wrote plays for stage and radio, an opera libretto, and poetry.
Among other evaluations, Olga Kenyon
admired AB
's capacity to represent the interiority and social frustrations of gifted undervalued women:
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
2
women with twentieth-century awareness of their problems, which however are problems unchanged since...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
This novel uses medieval allegory to resolve the linguistic, psychological, and intellectual fragmentation of its heroine, Julia.
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press.
25
Much of it is set in the reading room of the British Library
(at this date situated...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ann Bridge
In 1928 Owen O'Malley
, with other members of the foreign service, was accused of speculating in francs: what became known as the francs case. His Times obituary suggested that he would have been...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Bowen
Frequent guests at Bowen's Court (where, says Victoria Glendinning, they ate and drank royally)
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf.
It is her only work set in the USA. Its protagonist is an orphan heroine, who hates her own gender and has an endless capacity for causing trouble. She is the first of EB
Literary responses
Elizabeth Bowen
Glendinning writes: She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link that connects Virginia Woolf
with Iris Murdoch
and Muriel Spark
.
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf.
xv
Elizabeth Jenkins
characteristically remarked that as Britain's leading woman of letters...
Textual Features
Caroline Blackwood
Critic Val Warner
called CB
a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction.
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research.
EB
was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
in 1970, and awarded a CBE in 1976, at the same time as Iris Murdoch
.
Berney, Kathryn A., editor. Contemporary Women Dramatists. St. James Press.
10
Textual Features
Joan Aiken
JA
also published a number of adult thrillers, romantic novels, and hybrids between these two genres. For these, as for her children's fiction, she favours settings in time or place which are either exotic or...
