Writer at War - Hardcover

Peter (ed) Conradi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906021228 ISBN 13: 9781906021221

Publisher: Short Books, 2010

Synopsis

These never-before published diaries and letters will be a MUST for every Iris Murdoch fan...These collected writings, never published before, comprise a diary which Iris Murdoch kept in her last summer at Oxford, immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, and her wartime correspondence with two men: the poet Frank Thomson, murdered in Bulgaria in 1944, and a teacher for the British Council, David Hicks. They reveal the young writer at her sprightly, original best - as gripped by her own affairs, and those of her friends and peers, as by the great affairs of the world; exuberant when in love, and yet remarkably philosophical even when love goes painfully wrong. Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War is a treasury of one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century - a fascinating private memoir which sheds new light on a brilliant mind in development, but also a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.

About this title

About the Author

Peter J. Conradi is the author of Iris Murdoch: A Life, the critically lauded biography of Iris Murdoch. He has written a number of other non fiction books, including At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral (Seren 2009) and Going Buddhist, which was published by Short Books in 2004.

Review

"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

"[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) could only be lived, so her dominant subject as a novelist-the interplay between intelligence and eros, reality and illusion, false magic and true-reached down into the intensity of her early adult relations." --The Daily Telegraph

"[The] book dispels th[e] simplistic view and shows the extent of what Conradi calls "the freedom" of Murdoch's mind. It also makes me want to give her fiction another try." --Frank Freeman, First Things

"The diary and letters demonstrate how deeply Murdoch mined her own life for the dilemmas, milieu, and emotion that emerge in her novels...Conradi has done an excellent job of editing and introducing these pages; what one ultimately takes away from them is a portrait of a complex young woman in the process of becoming a formidable artist." --Harvard Review Online

Edition details

• Publisher: Short Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1906021228
• ISBN 13: 9781906021221
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 303