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

• Main Author: Carla de Petris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Firenze University Press 2016-06-01
• Series: Studi Irlandesi : a Journal of Irish Studies
• Online Access: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-sijis/article/view/7271

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.