Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-1945
Peter J Conradi
Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-1945
These writings, never before published, comprise Iris Murdoch's intimate war-time correspondence with two men. First the poet Frank Thompson, who was murdered in Bulgaria in 1944, and whom she grew to love. To Frank she reveals her innermost self - her journey from Oxford student to apprentice writer in bohemian London. Then there are love-letters to David Hicks, a teacher in Cairo, with whom she duelled and fought. A Writer at War also includes the journal that Murdoch, as a touring actress, kept during late August 1939.
3.2 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism, Essays, Journals & Letters |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
256 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-1906021221 |
| Publisher |
Short Books |
| |
These writings, never before published, comprise Iris Murdoch's intimate war-time correspondence with two men. First the poet Frank Thompson, who was murdered in Bulgaria in 1944, and whom she grew to love. To Frank she reveals her innermost self - her journey from Oxford student to apprentice writer in bohemian London. Then there are love-letters to David Hicks, a teacher in Cairo, with whom she duelled and fought. A Writer at War also includes the journal that Murdoch, as a touring actress, kept during late August 1939.
Read an extract from the letters at Times Online
Reviews
The Scotsman
Ian Irvine
"Conradi's own exemplary biography of the writer did much to restore complexity to the life and work. Now, with the publication of these writings from Murdoch's early twenties, it is possible to recapture the powerful allure, intellectual and physical, which this exceptional person exerted on so many of her contemporaries."
28/02/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Claudia Fitzherbert
"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."
28/02/2010
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The Sunday Times
Frances Wilson
"Murdoch’s youthful mind is as sharp and polished as a sword, but Conradi’s editing is not. Random footnotes pop up like glove puppets interrupting a soliloquy, to explain that “Je t’aime” means “I love you” and that Baudelaire is a French poet. There is no index, there are typos galore and a footnote that refers to the missing last page of Thompson’s final letter to Murdoch is itself tantalisingly unfinished — “how Frank signed off his last letter we will probably never”."
28/02/2010
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The Spectator
A.N. Wilson
"It has to be said that only Iris Murdoch addicts will want to buy this book before it reaches its inevitable destination on the remainder tables. The letters to Thompson were written when she was an undergraduate and they have the touchingness, but also the boringness, you would expect from this fact. The letters to Hicks … capture her very vividly."
28/02/2010
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The Daily Mail
Sam Leith
"Conradi may deplore the Iris personality cult, but A Writer At War is the beneficiary of, and a contribution to, that cult. That's certainly not to say it's without interest, but it's a patchy thing... It's illuminating above all about her personality, and sometimes touching, but a negligible contribution to her canon of work. It doesn't help, either, that it's sloppily put together"
28/02/2010
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
"This is a strange volume, poorly conceived as well as thoroughly self-sabotaged… So Murdoch, "in life so august, remote and intensely private", has been posthumously reduced to caricature, "bonking (young Iris) or bonkers (elderly Iris)". But why would an august, remote, intensely private novelist be any better served by the publication of a diary written when she was a teenager, and of two more or less romantic correspondences?"
28/02/2010
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