Iris Murdoch and the Common Reader Podcast

In this special edition of the podcast Miles is joined by Dan Read (Kingston) to answer questions sent in by listeners. These are: Is it possible to say where Murdoch stands in relation to other ‘great’ writers? Is she on a par with Dickens, Shakespeare (or others) for example? In A Fairly Honourable Defeat Murdoch assigns astrological birth signs on several of the characters, and they discuss the subject somewhat knowledgeably. Does she give evidence of interest in the subject in other works? Do we know if de Beauvoir read Murdoch? Does she mention Murdoch anywhere in her writings? Did any other existentialists reply to Murdoch’s criticisms of their views? To what extent are changing ways of reading Murdoch novels mere fashion, and how much do they have to do with what someone might refer to as “academic work”? Iris seemed to say that philosophy and fiction were totally separate things. Is this borne out in her work or not? I'd like to know more about which of her contemporaries she admired most as a reader. (And the writers she hated reading!) Did Kierkegaard influence Murdoch's writing and thinking? What do you think is the most underrated work by Iris? Daniel Read lectures at the University of Kingston (UK). His monograph, Degrees of Evil in Iris Murdoch's Fiction and Philosophy, is due from Palgrave MacMillan later this year.

This talk was given by Professor Anne Rowe at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester (UK) on Saturday 17th February 2024. Anne Rowe is Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University. Her publications include The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002); Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life (2010) with Priscilla Martin, and Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 (2015), co-edited with Avril Horner and Iris Murdoch (2019) in the Writers and their Work series from Liverpool University Press. She has just completed work as a co-editor of the Poetry of Iris Murdoch (Forthcoming).

In this episode Miles is join by Paul Hullah (Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo) and Chiho Omichi (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo) to discuss Murdoch and Japan - her visits, the inspiration she took from Japan, Murdoch in translation, her philosophical links, the Japanese Murdoch Society, and much more. https://irismurdochjapan.jp/en/ Paul Hullah (MA (Hons), PhD) is Associate Professor of British Literature at Meiji Gakuin University and, since 2015) has been President of The Iris Murdoch Society of Japan (1997-). With Murdoch’s active participation, he co-edited and wrote a 'Critical Introduction’ to the authorised collection of Murdoch’s Poems (UEP 1997), and her Occasional Essays (1998). He has published literary studies, including Romanticism and Wild Places (Edinburgh University Press & Quadrega 1998) and We Found Her Hidden: The Remarkable Poetry of Christina Rossetti (Partridge 2016); twenty university-level ‘literary’ textbooks, including Rock UK: A Sociocultural History of British Popular Music (Cengage, 2013); and seven collections of award-winning poetry, including Climbable (Partridge 2016). Murdoch herself described Hullah’s poetry as ‘fine... with an enchantment that touches me deeply’, and John Bayley also praised his work. Hullah received the 2013 Asia Pacific Brand Laureate Award for ‘paramount contribution to the cultivation of literature’. He was keynote speaker at the 2022 Tenth International Iris Murdoch Conference (University of Chichester, UK), contributed a chapter on Murdoch and Zen to the recent volume Iris Murdoch’s Literary Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), and is currently working on The Japanese Iris: Murdoch’s Affinities and Interactions with Japanese Thought, a critical monograph tracing the important impact of Japanese ideas on Murdoch’s literary and philosophical writings. Chiho Omichi is Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan and Vice President of the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan. She earned a BA in English literature from Tokyo’s Keio University, MAs from Keio University and London University, and a PhD from Keio University. Her research considers British 20th-century women novelists, particularly Murdoch and Dorothy Richardson, and she has published widely in this area.

In this episode Miles is joined by Gillian Dooley (Flinders University, Australia) and Daniel Read (Kingston University, UK) to celebrate the Twentieth Anniversary of 'From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch', a collection of interviews with Murdoch from across her career, as well as to discuss the wealth of unpublished interview and conversational material in the Kingston Archive. We discuss what we can learn about her works but, perhaps more enticingly, the woman behind them. Until the end of 2023 the collection is half price from the publisher using code JHOL23. https://uscpress.com/From-a-Tiny-Corner-in-the-House-of-Fiction Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English literature at Flinders University, South Australia. She has published widely on various literary and historical topics, including Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, and the maritime explorer Matthew Flinders. Her latest monograph is Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music is due out from Manchester University Press in 2024. Daniel Read teaches and researches at the University of Kingston, UK. He is an editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and his first monograph, The Problem of Evil in the Fiction and Philosophy of Iris Murdoch is due to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the 'Iris Murdoch Today' series in 2024.

In this episode Miles is joined by artists Kevin Petrie (University of Sunderland), Matthew Richardson (University of Kingston) and Carol Sommer to discuss their latest work which has been inspired by Murdoch's writing. Kevin Petrie is Head of the School of Art and Design and Professor of Glass and Ceramics at University of Sunderland. He is known for his artwork on ceramics and glass, especially in combination with printmaking and drawing. Kevin has also written and edited a number of books and articles about ceramics and glass and lectured around the World. Kevin’s artwork is held in a number of private and public collections including National Glass Centre and National Museums of Scotland. In recent years, Kevin has focused on his painting practice and this work can be seen on his website at https://kevinpetrieart.com. Matthew Richardson is an artist and illustrator who works across physical and digital media seeing how things fit or collide through processes of collage and assemblage. He is interested in how, why and what is kept or discarded, lost or found, and left behind. He studied at Central St. Martins and Cardiff University and is currently completing a practice-based PhD at Kingston School of Art, titled Para-illustration: Gaps, fragments and spaces of the literary imagination, which explores the materiality of a writer’s notes, drafts and archives as a method for making literary images. https://matthew-richardson.co.uk/ Carol Sommer visual artist and art educator based in Darlington, Co. Durham. I’m interested in the potential of piracy to interrogate value systems. Sometimes within the aesthetic context of conceptual writing, my practice includes making books, videos, performances, installation and an Instagram account @cartography_for_girls. In 2019 I completed a practice led Ph.D. at Leeds Beckett University, and I am the author of ‘Cartography for Girls, an A-Z of Orientations Identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch’. Her work is currently being exhibited at the Phoenix Art Space in Brighton until the 19th November as part of the ‘Are you a Woman in Authority’ exhibition. https://www.carolsommer.net/ https://www.phoenixbrighton.org/Events/are-you-a-woman-in-authority/

In this podcast, Miles is joined by Eva-Maria Düringer (Tübingen, Germany) and Mariëtte Willemsen (Amsterdam University College) to discuss their work translating 'The Sovereignty of Good' into German and Dutch respectively. Eva-Maria Düringer is a researcher at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she currently leads a funded project on suffering and its role in virtue ethics - you can find her website here emduringer.de. Her work is very much influenced by the writings of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot. She is the author of Evaluating Emotions (Palgrave 2014) and various articles on emotions and ethics. As well as the German translation of The Sovereignty of Good which came out this past July with Suhrkamp, here: https://www.suhrkamp.de/person/eva-maria-dueringer-p-17193 Mariëtte Willemsen is senior lecturer in Philosophy at Amsterdam University College. She teaches courses in Ethics and The History of Philosophy, with a focus on Arthur Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. Together with Hannah Altorf she translated Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Boom 2003). Her most recent publications look into connections between Schopenhauer and Murdoch, and Weil and Murdoch. Together with Hannah Altorf she is currently working on a translation of Iris Murdoch's 1977 book, The Fire and The Sun. Why Plato Banished the Artists. You can find the details of their translation here: https://www.deslegte.com/over-god-en-het-goede-1195981/ There's a great interview with Mariëtte here: https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/05/14/genealogies-willemsen/

Miles is joined by Lesley Jamieson (Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) to discuss her new book, 'Iris Murdoch's Practical Metaphysics: A Guide to her Early Writings' (Palgrave, 2023). You can find out more about the book here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-36080-0

In this episode Miles is joined by Gillian Dooley (Flinders University, Australia), Jan Skinner (Formerly Oxford University's Continuing Education Department), and Frances White (Chichester University) to discuss the influence of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf on the thought and writing of Iris. Gillian Dooley is Honorary Associate Professor in English Literature at Flinders University Australia. Editor of From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch as well as the recent Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music Sounds and Silences recently published with Palgrave. She’s also published widely on Austen, and is the leading expert on Austen’s connections with music. Jan Skinner was formerly a tutor at Oxford's Continuing Education Department, who has published work on the connections between George Eliot and Murdoch. Frances White is author of the forthcoming monograph Iris Murdoch and Remorse with Palgrave Macmillan, as well as the co-edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination. She has written most detailed examination of Murdoch’s connections with Woolf in the collection Iris Murdoch Connected which is published by the University of Tennessee Press.

In this episode Miles is joined by Greg McElwain (College of Idaho, USA) and Ellie Robson (Birkbeck, University of London)to discuss the life and work of Mary Midgley. Greg is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The College of Idaho, USA. His research focuses on the thought of Mary Midgley and the intersection of animal and environmental ethics. He is the author of Mary Midgley: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2020) and is currently working on a book based on his interviews with Midgley from 2011-18 titled Mary Midgley on What Matters: Conversations on Science, Ethics, and Nature (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). You can buy 'Mary Midgley: An Introduction' here: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781350047563 Ellie recently completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. In her thesis, Ellie argues that Midgley’s meta-ethics is best-read as a form of Neo-Aristotelian naturalism. Her research addresses the neglect of 20th century women philosophers from analytic philosophy and provides an explanation of Midgley’s relative oversight within this tradition.

In this episode Miles is joined by Prof. Anne Rowe (Chichester and Kingston) to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of what may be Murdoch's greatest novel. Anne is Visiting Professor at the IMRC at Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow at Kingston. Her many books include 'Iris Murdoch' in the 'Writers and their Work' Series, which you can purchase at a discounted rate from the Society, here: https://irismurdochsociety.org.uk/product/iris-murdoch-writers-and-their-work/