Iris Murdoch's achievements in philosophy have often been overshadowed by her reputation as a novelist and dramatist. In fact, however, Murdoch's philosophical and literary work are closely interrelated: her novels and plays can be read as meditations on the problems about freedom, consciousness, and the nature of the good that she addresses in her philosophical writings. Murdoch herself, in a 1978 interview with Bryan Magee, stressed the unity of her philosophical and literary work when she remarked that "philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations."

Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on 15 July 1919 to Wills John Hughes Murdoch, a civil servant, and Irene Alice Richardson Murdoch. A few years later the family moved to London, where Murdoch began her education at the Froebel Institute; she was a boarding student at Badminton School in Bristol from ages twelve to eighteen. In 1938 she...