For the first time, a selection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and important letters has been collected together to give us a full, living portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers.

Including letters to well-known literary figures and philosophers such as Raymond Queneau, Michael Oakenshott, Elias Canetti, Philippa Foot and Brigid Brophy, Living on Paper is the most significant publication about Murdoch since the wave of books published in the wake of her death. The editors Anne Rowe and Avril Horner discuss how the letters - written between 1934, when Murdoch was a school girl, and 1995, near the end of her writing career - reveal Murdoch’s complex personal life and sexual identity, as well as showing a great mind at work. Gradually, we see the ways in which Murdoch’s complicated emotional life fed into her novels’ plots and characters.

Chair: Helen Taylor

Speaker biographies:

Avril Horner is Emeritus Professor of English at Kingston University, London. She writes on women authors and Gothic fiction; her publications include co-authored books on Daphne du Maurier and Edith Wharton. With Anne Rowe she co-edited Iris Murdoch and Morality (2010) and Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts (2012).

Anne Rowe is Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University. She is Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and her publications include The Visual Arts and Iris Murdoch (2002) and, with Priscilla Martin, Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life (2011).

Helen Taylor is Professor of English, and Humanities Arts and Culture Fellow, University of Exeter, as well as Honorary Fellow of the British Association of American Studies. She has published widely on women writers and the literature and culture of the American South, and is writing a book about women’s memories and experiences of reading fiction.

Part of Festival of Ideas.

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