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Living on Paper

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099570158

  • Length: 688  Pages

  • Dimensions: 235mm x 40mm x 153mm

  • Weight: 912g

  • RRP: £14.99

Living on Paper

  • Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

EDITED BY AVRIL HORNER AND ANNE ROWE

‘Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut’

This collection of Iris Murdoch’s most interesting and revealing letters gives us a living portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch grappling with philosophical questions, as well as feeling her anguish when a novel obstinately refuses to come together.

They uncover Murdoch’s famed personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its intriguing complexity, and her penchant for living beyond the bounds of social acceptability. We also begin to see the 'real life material' that fed into her fiction, despite her claims that her fiction never drew on reality. Above all we see the accumulation of life – intimate, irreverent, fiercely engaged with the world – in this extraordinary collection of letters.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099570158

  • Length: 688  Pages

  • Dimensions: 235mm x 40mm x 153mm

  • Weight: 912g

  • RRP: £14.99

Reviews

  • Astonishing

    John Sutherland

  • Deeply impressive

    Guardian

  • Reading these letters is like living Murdoch's whole creatively, sexually and intellectually voracious life alongside her, and at breakneck speed. Thrilling

    Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

  • The letters themselves have been selected with conviction and care...the overwhelming sense of this volume is one of richness

    Times Literary Supplement

  • Her mind, here as in everything she wrote, is formidable

    New York Times

  • Astonishing epistolary abundance from a woman who meant it when she told a friend that she could "live in letters"... Few books leave the reader with as dizzying sense of the need to question absolutely everything

    Daily Telegraph

  • We find a passionate engagement with the world of ideas, but most of all with friends, lovers, and pupils. These letters reveal Murdoch's extraordinary talent for affection, exuberant sense of fun, razor-sharp intelligence, and acute awareness of the transcendent

    Karen Armstrong

  • Exemplary... The reader grows up and grows old with Murdoch

    Literary Review

  • This collection of letters provides a fascinating insight into the life of a complex and important novelist. It is a wonderful book

    Alexander McCall Smith

  • Murdoch was not writing for posterity; she was writing for her friends, or rather as a way of maintaining her friendships, whether intellectual, passionate or both...the letters reinforce Murdoch's qualities as a person

    Independent

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About the Author

Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She read Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, and after working in the Treasury and abroad, was awarded a research studentship in Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948 she returned to Oxford as fellow and tutor at St Anne's College and later taught at the Royal College of Art. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 and in the 1997 PEN Awards received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.

Iris Murdoch

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Where to start reading Iris Murdoch's books

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Extracts

Living on Paper by Iris Murdoch

It is hard for us to imagine Iris Murdoch submitting her first novel – and not even having a title for it – but here, you can read the letter that accompanied the manuscript of Under The Net

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