Murdoch, Dame Jean Iris

(1919-1999)

   Born in Dublin, she read classics, ancient history, and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she became a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford. She married the novelist John Bayley, whom she met at Oxford. In addition to her 34 novels, she wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She began to suffer the early effects of Alzheimer's disease in 1995, which she at first attributed to writer's block. Her life was made into a film, Iris, in 2001, with Judy Dench and John Broadbent in the lead roles. Her only two collections of verse are A Year of Birds (1978; revised edition, 1984), 12 engravings accompanying Murdoch's twelve poems, one for each month; and Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997).

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).