Before the 20th century, it was nearly impossible for a philosophically gifted woman to gain recognition.
Well, unless she was a royal or at least a duchess.
How that situation began to change, at least in Britain, is part of the story told in a new biography of four women, who became friends at Oxford during the second word war.
One of the subjects of the book is Iris Murdoch (pictured). Though she is best-known for her novels, she was also a philosophy don at Oxford for 15 years.
Learn more about the other women, and their pathbreaking friendships and careers: https://econ.trib.al/RBt25TM
Credit: Getty Images
Considering Murdoch’s view that morality is real and that, with the right conceptual resources, we can perceive it
Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms
Dirge, a song of lamentation in mourning for someone's death; or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than anelegy. An ancient genre employed by Pindar in Greek and notably by Propertius in Latin. The dirge also occurs in English, most famously in the ariel's song 'Full fathom five thy father lies' in Shakespear's The Tempest.
我抄這段，才恍然大悟梁兄翻譯的大海，大海之作者的先生John Bayley所寫的《輓歌》（Elegy for Iris，有天下文化出版社譯本），實在有典故，
***
我抄的沒錯。英國文學中當然有許多人寫dirges，
Dirge, a song of lamentation in mourning for someone's death; or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than anelegy. An ancient genre employed by Pindar in Greek and notably by Propertius in Latin. The dirge also occurs in English, most famously in the ariel's song 'Full fathom five thy father lies' in Shakespear's The Tempest.
我抄這段，才恍然大悟梁兄翻譯的大海，大海之作者的先生John Bayley所寫的《輓歌》（Elegy for Iris，有天下文化出版社譯本），實在有典故，
***
我抄的沒錯。英國文學中當然有許多人寫dirges，
in ''Elegy for Iris,'' his memoir of their lives together.
John Bayley fell in love with Iris Murdoch when he was in his late 20's and she was in her early 30's; she passed his window on a bicycle. ''I indulged the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her; that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive,'' he wrote. ''She was not a woman with a past or an unknown present.'' They were married in 1956; he is her only close survivor.
The novelist Mary Gordon, reviewing ''Elegy for Iris'' in The Times, touched on their relationship. ''Radical privacy, sealing compartments of her life off from each other, was always a condition of Iris Murdoch's selfhood, and anyone who married her had to deal with that. From the beginning, she had friendships that she kept from Bayley, and love affairs that he was meant to understand had nothing to do with him. There are some hints that this was not always easy, but Bayley rose to the challenge.'' Ms. Gordon then quotes Mr. Bayley's memoir: ''In early days, I always thought it would be vulgar -- as well as not my place -- to give any indications of jealousy, but she knew when it was there, and she soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.''
Slipping Into A Baffling Darkness In 1995 Miss Murdoch told an interviewer that she was experiencing severe writer's block, noting that the struggle to write had left her in ''a hard, dark place.'' In 1996, Mr. Bayley announced that she had Alzheimer's disease, which she had suffered for five years by the time she died. Her final three weeks were spent in a nursing home. If ''Elegy for Iris'' offers a moving evocation of a great love story, it also provides a grim record of watching the personality of a loved one gradually dwindle under the burden of fear, bafflement and grief.
John Bayley fell in love with Iris Murdoch when he was in his late 20's and she was in her early 30's; she passed his window on a bicycle. ''I indulged the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her; that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive,'' he wrote. ''She was not a woman with a past or an unknown present.'' They were married in 1956; he is her only close survivor.
The novelist Mary Gordon, reviewing ''Elegy for Iris'' in The Times, touched on their relationship. ''Radical privacy, sealing compartments of her life off from each other, was always a condition of Iris Murdoch's selfhood, and anyone who married her had to deal with that. From the beginning, she had friendships that she kept from Bayley, and love affairs that he was meant to understand had nothing to do with him. There are some hints that this was not always easy, but Bayley rose to the challenge.'' Ms. Gordon then quotes Mr. Bayley's memoir: ''In early days, I always thought it would be vulgar -- as well as not my place -- to give any indications of jealousy, but she knew when it was there, and she soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.''
Slipping Into A Baffling Darkness In 1995 Miss Murdoch told an interviewer that she was experiencing severe writer's block, noting that the struggle to write had left her in ''a hard, dark place.'' In 1996, Mr. Bayley announced that she had Alzheimer's disease, which she had suffered for five years by the time she died. Her final three weeks were spent in a nursing home. If ''Elegy for Iris'' offers a moving evocation of a great love story, it also provides a grim record of watching the personality of a loved one gradually dwindle under the burden of fear, bafflement and grief.
February 9, 1999
OBITUARYIris Murdoch, Novelist and Philosopher, Is Dead
By RICHARD NICHOLLS
 The Associated Press |
| Dame Iris Murdoch in London, 1998. |
ris Murdoch, a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic British writer whose 26 novels offered lively plots, complex characters and intellectual speculation, died yesterday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79 and had Alzheimer's disease. Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented recently in ''Elegy for Iris,'' a memoir by her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley, who was at her bedside when she died. 
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