(RNS) — The celebrated British novelist Iris Murdoch, who would have turned 100 this week, anticipated young Americans' attempt to find goodness without God.

For Iris Murdoch, the life worth leading is a life that leads to others, to a beyond, to an other. Magical Thinking Not surprisingly, Murdoch often mentions religion as another source of unselfing.

“Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were familiar figures during my undergraduate years at Oxford in the mid-1950s, cycling around town together”, wrote Philip French in this week’s Observer.

Moreover, Iris presents Murdoch as sentimental and bland, her ideas restricted to a feminine context. “Human beings love each other in sex, in friendship, and when they’re in love.

Four years after Iris Murdoch's death, her husband is selling the working library of nearly 1,000 books collected and annotated by the late author over six decades, auctioneers said Monday.

HOW does one describe Iris Murdoch? Let us count the ways: distinguished Oxford philosopher, prize-winning novelist, dramatist, critic, passionate student. One of England's charming blue-eyed ...

The Green Knight By Iris Murdoch Viking, 472 pages, $23.95 Victoria Glendinning, in her biography of Elizabeth Bowen, mentions the Anglo-Irish writer’s admiration of Iris Murdoch and especially ...

In life, Murdoch dismissed any suggestion that she based her complex characters on real people, but her biographer Conradi, whose latest book, Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries ...

Iris Murdoch: A LifeBy Peter ConradiNorton, 706 pages, $35“I wanted to write the first biography of Iris,” declares Peter Conradi in his introduction to “Iris Murdoch: A Life,” and so he ...

The secrets of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley's unconventional marriage. The 43-year marriage between writers Iris Murdoch and John Bayley - who believed in taking each other for granted - is a ...