Criticism by others

Iris Murdoch Resources offers interesting links to reviews (under the heading Criticism by others), an outline of her life and professional career, a list of her novels (some with comments by the author of the page) and philosophical works, and a list of comments by Iris Murdoch on her own works.

Go(o)d in Iris Murdoch (by Alan Jacobs). "It would seem that the focus of her philosophy rests on a single letter: the presence or absence of that letter can determine the ground of our moral lives: 'Good represents the reality of which God is the dream'."

Existentialism in Iris Murdoch (by Elijah Milgram). "Murdoch's central insight is that the hard part of figuring out what to do is coming by the right description of your situation...So practical reasoning is a matter of substituting better descriptions for worse. But, whether of the traditional or the novelistic variety, satisfying arguments for her claims would have to start out from a much more substantial characterization of how one goes about replacing one description for another, better description."

Review on The Green Knight, "her most baffling and complex book. At first appearance it's a botched effort: implausible, uneven and clumsy. The plot, which is so convoluted as to baffle summarization, involves murderous siblings, a man returned from the dead for vengeance, the mystical fumblings of a celibate homosexual, the coming of age of three young girls and a boy, and a great deal else."

Reflection in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, a review by Robert Wilson: "Iris Murdoch examines the nature of reality through the many reflections in the novel, using these reflections to mirror the true relationships between contingency and non-contingency, between appearance and reality. "

Unconsciousness to Reality (Murdoch's A Severed Head) an essay by Robert Wilson, in which he examines "how Murdoch infuses the novel with elements of Freudian psychology to develop the protagonist's movement from the unconscious to reality."