Iris Murdoch. Existentialists and Mystics (Book Review)

ReviewThree of the essays in this career-spanning collection make up Dame Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good, a little classic which I regularly assign in my ethics courses. When I do, some of the students who have been impressed by it pick up one or another of her novels, and of those students, some, by now predictably, come back to ask whether the novel and the philosophical treatise are really by the same author. What my students are noticing is not simply the simultaneous living out of two rather different literary lives, but a problem in a unified project that we are at last in a position to understand as philosophical throughout, now that we have on hand a retrospective of Murdoch's overtly philosophical work. Almost all of her short nonfiction is included, as well as two Socratic dialogs; with the sole exception of "The Fire and the Sun," it is tight, graceful writing, and a pleasure to read