Afterlife

Abstract

Iris Murdoch spent her last days at Vale House in Oxford and died there on 8 February 1999 with her husband at her side. Such was her stature in British letters that the BBC evening news gave her death precedence over that of King Hussein of Jordan. In the final years of her life she was revered — almost sanctified — by an adoring public, although in academic circles her work had fallen out of favour. Now, ten years later, this situation has been reversed: her work is understandably less significant to the public but within Murdoch scholarship a renaissance is underway: she is now at the forefront in certain areas of current literary theory and her work is hailed as a paradigm for complex, morally engaged fiction to which interdisciplinary attention should be paid.