Ireland

Abstract

Biographical information on Iris Murdoch usually begins with the fact that she was born in Dublin. She presented — and to some extent misrepresented — herself as Anglo-Irish. Murdoch was indeed born in Dublin, but her claim that she spent her first year or two there was exaggerated. Her father gave a London address on her birth certificate and the family settled permanently in London when she was a baby. Her ancestry on both sides was Irish and both her parents grew up in Ireland. However, her talking of Ireland as ‘my poor native land’ and her proud declaration that ‘of course, I’m not English, I’m Irish’¹ might suggest a youth spent in Ireland apart from her time at boarding school and university. In ‘The Irish — Are They Human?’, an amusing undergraduate article written for the student newspaper Cherwell, she purports to speak as ‘we Irish’.² Her Trishness’ is a question and a problem that has engaged Murdoch scholars. The first chapter of Conradi’s biography is entitled ‘You ask how Irish she is?’ and provides a detailed account of her forebears and family. A.N. Wilson calls a chapter in his memoir ‘Considers herself Irish’ and writes, ‘when I came to attempt my biography of IM, it was over the Irish question that we began to come unstuck’.³ Her nationality was evidently a sensitive area.⁴