![]() All her novels draw from life to a great or lesser extent, but it is her London novels that define her literary legacy. London becomes ‘Murdochland’ in her novels, a distinct territory that serves her unique form of adventurous realism.Īs she walked the streets as a child, as a civil servant at the Treasury, or later as an acclaimed novelist, she constantly observed her surroundings, taking notes on the characters she observed in pubs, capturing the ambience in art galleries, and listening to conversations on the tube. ![]() Following the Second World War she kept a succession of flats in London, even after she had given up teaching at the Royal College of Art in 1967, and her final residence in Cornwall Gardens remained in her possession until her death. Murdoch, who grew up in Chiswick and later returned to London in 1942 after graduating from Oxford, had as good a knowledge of the streets, pubs, landmarks and history as any London cabbie. ![]() ‘I know the city well’ says Jake Donoghue, the flâneur protagonist of her first novel Under the Net (1954). Post-war London is Iris Murdoch’s domain perhaps only Dickens and Woolf charted the city to the same extent. ![]()
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