The Iris Murdoch: the saint and the artist

Description

Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi's acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley. 'Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century's most remarkable novelists and thinkers.' John Bayley Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including 'The Bell', 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat', 'The Black Prince' and the Booker Prize-winning 'The Sea, The Sea'. In 'The Saint and the Artist', the only full critical examination of Murdoch's work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided... Part 1 "A Kind of Moral Psychology": introductory - "existentialist and mystic" "Under the Net" and the redemption of particulars "Against Gravity" - the early novels, "An Accidental Man" Eros in "A Severed Head", "Bruno's Dream". Part 2 "Open and Closed": the sublime in "The Bell" and "The Unicorn" self-sufficiency in "The Time of the Angels", "The Nice and the Good". Part 3 "The closest compression of form with the widest expansion of meaning": "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" "The Black Prince" "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine", "Henry and Cato" "The Sea, The Sea" conclusion - "Nuns and Soldiers", "The Philosopher's Pupil" postscript - "The Good Apprentice" and "The Book and the Brotherhood".