2. BIOGRAPHYBIOGRAPHY
Iris Murdoch was born in Phibsborough, Dublin, Ireland, the daughter
of Irene Alice and Wills John Hughes Murdoch.
Murdoch was educated in progressive independent schools, entering
the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925 and attending Badminton
School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938 she went up
to Somerville College, Oxford, with the intention of studying English,
but switched to Classics.
From 1947 to 1948 Iris Murdoch studied philosophy as a postgraduate
at Newnham College, Cambridge. She met Wittgenstein at Cambridge
but did not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College
professorship before she arrived.In 1948 she became a fellow of St
Anne's College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. From
1963 to 1967 she taught one day a week in the General Studies
department at the Royal College of Art.
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3.
In 1956 Murdoch married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and
from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University,
whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic
partnership lasted more than forty years until Murdoch's death.
Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, was published in 1954. She
had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first
monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She went on
to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well
as poetry and drama. In 1976 she was named to the Commander of
Order of the British Empire and in 1987 was made a Dame. Commander
of Order of the British Empire. She was awarded honorary degrees by
the University of Bath (DLitt,1983), University of Cambridge (1993)and
Kingston University (1994), among others. She was elected a Foreign
Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
1982.
Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was published in 1995. Iris
Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1997 and died in
1999 in Oxford..
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