Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Phibsborough, on July 15, 1919. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a family of Presbyterian farmers in Hillhall, County Down, Northern Ireland, and her mother, Irene Alice. Richardson, who was educated as a child to be a singer, came from a middle class family in Dublin, belonging to the Anglican Church of Ireland. When she was barely a few weeks old, the Murdochs moved to London, where the father had obtained a position in the Health Ministry. Iris Murdoch studied in progressive schools: first at the Froebel Demonstration School in London, and then at the Badminton School in Bristol. At age 19 he enrolled at Somerville College, Oxford, where he studied classical literature, ancient history and philosophy. She also studied philosophy as a postgraduate at the Newnham College in Cambridge, where she had Ludwig Wittgenstein as his teacher. In 1948, she began working as a professor at St Anne's College, Oxford. He wrote his first novel, Under the Net (considered by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels of English literature of the twentieth), in 1954, although he had previously published essays on philosophy, including the first written study in English on Jean- Paul Sartre Two years later, in 1956, he met the man with whom he would share his life, John Bayley, professor of English literature and writer. Their marriage would last forty-three years, and Bayley cared for her until her last days. Iris Murdoch published twenty-five other novels, among which we can mention The Sand Castle (1957), The Bell (1958), The Head Cut (1961), The Unicorn (1963, Impedimenta, 2014) Bruno's Dream (1969), The Black Prince (1973, James Tait Black Memorial Award), Henry and Cato (1976; Impedimenta, 2013), The Sea, the Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Book and Brotherhood (1987; Impedimenta, 2016) and The Green Knight (1993). In 1995 he began to suffer the devastating effects of Alzheimer's disease, which he initially attributed to a mere "writer's block". In 1997, she was awarded the Golden Pen Award for her entire career. He died at age 79, in 1999, and his ashes were scattered throughout the garden of the Oxford crematorium.
