Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War
These writings, never before published, comprise Iris Murdoch’s intimate war-time correspondence with two men. First the poet Frank Thompson, who was murdered in Bulgaria in 1944, and whom she grew to love. To Frank she reveals her innermost self � her journey from Oxford student to apprentice writer in bohemian London. Then there are love-letters to David Hicks, a teacher in Cairo, with whom she duelled and fought. These carry an intensity of feeling and convey an extraordinary human drama, seductive, passionate, wise, witty and ultimately heart-breaking.
A Writer at War also includes the journal that Murdoch, as a touring actress, kept during late August 1939, conveying the uniquely strange atmosphere of that count-down to Armageddon. This treasury of writing by one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century sheds new light on a brilliant mind in development, and is also a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes in the Second World War.
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About the author
Peter J Conradi is the author, among other books of Iris Murdoch: A Life, the critically lauded biography of Iris Murdoch and more recently