Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Hardcover

Conradi, Peter J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002571234 ISBN 13: 9780002571234

Verlag: HarperCollins, 2001

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

With a new film of Murdoch's relationship with her husband John Bayley in the offing, the timing of this revealing authorised biography is propos. Dame Iris Murdoch played a major role in English life and letters for nearly half a century, and while her achievement may have been said to falter in the later years (only the most devoted admirer of the author could accept the bagginess and repetition of the later work), she was undoubtedly one of the great English novelists, with much of her best work as powerful and relevant today as when it was written. The adjective Murdochian now enjoys much currency, and her turbulent life story is quite as fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf. Conradi's assiduously detailed research paints a picture of the complex and engaging woman, and as a biographer he goes to some lengths to avoid interposing himself upon the subject. Conradi is particularly interesting on Murdoch's relationships with some of the most challenging thinkers, artists and writers of the 20th century. With access to a massive amount of diaries and papers, Conradi creates a vivid panoply of Murdoch's whole generation while never losing the focus on his fascinating subject. He is particularly moving on the sad final years when the author's faculties deserted her, although the definitive account of this period is to be found in John Bayley's book.

Reseña del editor:

A full and revealing biography of one of the century’s greatest English writers and an icon to a generation

Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A.S.Byatt notes, she is ‘absolutely central to our culture’. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognizable Murdoch world, and the adjective ‘Murdochian’ has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interract intricately and strangely. Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well-known; hers has been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised. For Iris’s formative years, astonishingly, movingly and intimately documented by Conradi’s meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured the Second World War, and her life like her books was full of the most extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers,artists, writers and poets of that turbulent time and after.

Peter Conradi is very close to both Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Iris’s husband, whose memoir of their life together has itself been the subject of an enormous amount of attention and acclaim. This is an extraordinarily full biography, for there are vast resources in diaries and papers and friends’ recollections, and whilst it is a superlative biography it will also be a superb history of a generation who have profoundly influenced our world today.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0002571234
• ISBN 13: 9780002571234
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 736