Announcements
Summer closure of archives
During the summer of 2010 a major building project will take place at the Penrhyn Road campus, involving a widening of the main corridor and also significant changes to the ground floor of the Learning Resource Centre. The Kingston University Archive will close on 14 May 2010 as a result, before re-opening in October 2010 at a new location within the LRC.
If you had planned to visit the archives during the summer, please email the team at archives@kingston.ac.uk and they will explore with you whether they can accommodate your visit.
Those attending the Iris Murdoch Conference on or around 10-11 September should order any materials they would like to consult from the archivist, Katie Giles, by 1 May 2010. Every effort will be made to accommodate requests. A selection of the recently acquired letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau will be on display at the conference and Katie Giles will be giving a talk on recent acquisitions.
We apologise for any disappointment and inconvenience this may cause but we look forward to welcoming you to our new archive reading room later in the year.
Iris song
Cathy Judge, songwriter and sculptor was so moved by the film Iris that she wrote a song entitled 'Iris' which can be heard on The Cathy Judge Band MySpace site.
Call for papers
The final call for papers has been issued for the Fifth International Iris Murdoch Conference, taking place in September 2010.
Letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau
The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies has recently acquired 164 letters form Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, which are now lodged in Kingston University's Archives and Special Collections. The acquisition was made possible with the help of grants from the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Breslauer Foundation, the Friends of the National Libraries and donations from members of the Iris Murdoch Society and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University.
The letters will be exhibited at the International Conference on Iris Murdoch - 'Murdoch on the Margins' - which will be held at Kingston University on 10th an 11th September 2010 and will be available for consultation after they have been catalogued. For more information about the availability of the letters please contact the archivist, Katie Giles.
Murdoch corresponded with Queneau between 1946 and 1975, though the majority of the letters were written between 1946 and 1955. This correspondence, which ranges over discussions about her embryonic writing career, her emotional well-being, her thoughts on God and on a variety of philosophers, will offer fresh primary source material for researchers wishing to track Murdoch's intellectual development and identify fresh influences in her novels. It will also enlarge understanding of influences and dialogues with other philosophers and provide theologians with deeper insights into Murdoch's spiritual life. Additionally, the unprecedented insight into her inner life allowed in these letters will inform any future biography or research into how a writer's life is transformed into art. Professor Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch's official biographer, suggests that this is "an electrifying run which [will] immeasurably enrich Kingston's archive".
This acquisition secures the status of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies as an internationally significant source of information for researchers worldwide on the life and work of Iris Murdoch. It already houses Iris Murdoch's heavily annotated working library from her Oxford home and the library from her London flat, her unpublished book on Heidegger and several other notebooks; the working papers (including typescripts, interviews and cassettes) of Peter Conradi, Murdoch's official biographer, and a number of other lengthy letter runs purchased by, or gifted to, the Centre since its inauguration in 2004. The addition of these crucially important letters to Raymond Queneau has immeasurably enriched these existing holdings.
Catalogue of Research in Iris Murdoch Studies
In discussing the route to moral behaviour, Murdoch argues that the pursuit of intellectual truths is akin to the quest for goodness. In the process she writes an affirmation, indeed a paean for scholarship:
I think there is a way of the intellect, a sense in which intellectual disciplines are moral disciplines [...] If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student - not to pretend to know what one does not - is the preparation for the honesty and humility of the scholar who does not even feel tempted to suppress the fact that damns his theory [...] But apart from special contexts, studying is normally an exercise of virtue as well as of talent, and shows us a fundamental way in which virtue is related to the real world.
EM, 373
In the spirit of the above quotation, the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies is creating a catalogue of ongoing research into Murdoch's life and letters. The merits of such a resource are manifold; to mention a few, it functions as a research dissemination tool for scholars already working in the area whilst also enabling younger researchers, embarking on their own investigations, to forge contacts with more established critics. Primarily, this catalogue functions as an interface of knowledge, facilitating the continued growth of this rich area of research on, arguably, Britain's most important twentieth century author.
To date, a good number of scholars have forwarded abstracts of their current work and these include projects concerned with Murdoch's attack on Nihilism and her thinking on religion and moral imagination. Another strand of research represented in the catalogue as it currently stands pertains to the issue of gender in Murdoch's writing. Studies exploring the relationship between her philosophy and fiction also assert themselves, as does scholarship on her affinities with continental thinkers and writers, for example, her erstwhile lover, Elias Canetti.
However, there are undoubtedly many other such affinities under exploration and many more of very interesting lines of intellectual enquiry which would benefit from being networked to the wider research community. If you are interested in letting us know what your area of interest is, (by adding your details to the catalogue) please forward a short abstract of your research project with your name, institutional affiliation and an email address to Elaine Morley.
The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies has acquired the library from Iris Murdoch's London home
Kingston University and the Iris Murdoch Society have bought the contents of Iris Murdoch's library from her London flat at Cornwall Gardens in Kensington. Murdoch kept a base in London until she died in 1999, and although this library is much smaller than her Oxford library which was acquired by Kingston University in 2004, it has several annotated texts that complement the existing one hundred annotated texts in the Oxford library. The annotations in the London library are written in books on education and politics, and will be invaluable to future researchers on Murdoch's work.
The London library also contains some items of intense personal significance to Murdoch. These include the leather-bound inscribed copy of The Sea, The Sea presented to her on winning the Booker Prize in 1978; the inscribed first editions of her novels that she had given to her mother; inscribed books from lovers, teachers and friends; her Book of Common Prayer, and the bible inscribed "with love from Grannie" given to Murdoch when she was ten years old (and with many underlinings in ink).
Now that Kingston University holds Murdoch's Oxford Library, her London Library, Peter Conradi's working archive amassed during the writing of Murdoch's official biography, and many important letter-runs, manuscripts, and other documents, the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies has become an unparalleled, world-class source of information for researchers on the life and work of Iris Murdoch.
