“Who am I? Well, I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.” Iris Murdoch and Ireland

Abstract

Peter J. Conradi, a lifelong friend and biographer of Iris Murdoch,
born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, speaks of her attachment to/
detachment from her country of origin as follows: “Her Irish connection
was reflected in a lifetime’s intellectual and emotional engagement
[that] – before her illness – transformed her from a romantic
Marxist idealist to a hard-line Unionist and defender of the politics
of Ian Paisley” (Conradi 2001b). This article is an attempt to investigate
possible connections between Murdoch’s social, ethnic, and
religious background and her philosophy based on up-rooted and
rootedness and self-distancing (terms borrowed from Simone Weil)
personified in the characters of her numerous novels. Her only works
set in Ireland, namely the short story “Something Special” (1958),
and the novels The Unicorn (1963) and The Red and the Green (1965),
will be analysed and compared with the novels of another womanwriter
from the same background, Jennifer Johnston, the doyen of
Irish writers, who has inherited and modified the same tradition in
the light of contemporary Irish history.