Overview

These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind (""sharp and polished as a sword"" as Frances Wilson describes it), while painting a vivid picture of life during the Second World War.

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9780199756032

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<br> The other truly remarkable thing about [Murdoch] was the freedom with which she shared her body and, as this book makes plain, there was nothing simplified about Murdoch's sex life . . . Reading Murdoch's letters during this period is something like being plugged into the national grid. Her subjects cover Proust ('delicious, subtle, beautiful'), Tacitus ('I tremble and adore'), politics ('I don't have a clear line on it any more'), the loss of her virginity ('in every way a good thing'), and her longing to write: 'Jesus God how I want to write. I want to write a long long & exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself and observe in the characters of others.' --The London Times<p><br> [Adds] to our picture of the vivid, unsettling, paradoxical nature of the young Iris Murdoch . . . We can see here the evolution of the novelist from the jejune chrysalis of her student experiences. Just as she later believed that true philosophy (metaphysics) coul

Author Information

Peter J. Conradi is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Iris Murdoch: A Life and, more recently, Going Buddhist and At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral.

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