Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of 26 novels, including The Bell, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Black Prince, and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea. In The Saint and the Artist, now fully revised and updated, distinguished literary critic Peter J. Conradi offers a lively and valuable critical appreciation of her works of fiction. He traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s. Conradi, who knew Murdoch well, suggests how her own life, transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels; he also argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy. Peter J. Conradi is the author of the highly acclaimed biography Iris Murdoch: A Life.

John Bayley

Peter Conradi's book is by far the best introduction to Iris Murdoch's work that has yet appeared,and as a critical study it will never be superceded.

It is tempting to read Iris Murdoch's novels in terms of her philosophical writings, but such an approach, Conradi argues, fails to grasp the richness of her mature fiction. He demonstrates how her concern with moral psychology and the complexity of humans is better explored in her novels than in her writing on existentialism. When first published in 1986 as Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (Macmillan), Conradi's was the first book-length study of Murdoch's fiction.