The Iris Murdoch Society podcast

In this episode Miles discusses the mid-twentieth century gothic novel with a particular focus on Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns and, of course, Iris Murdoch. An enduring subject of fascination, the gothic novel has undergone substantial change over the course of its history and the rise of the mid-century gothic – and how it interacts with other forms of fiction writing at this time – is one we know you’ll be interested in.

Joining Miles to discuss the mid-century female gothic is Avril Horner. Avril is Professor Emeritus of English at Kingston University and is the author of numerous books on the Gothic – most recently Women and the Gothic – with Sue Zlosnik (2016) – and the author of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (Manchester University Press, 2024) and of the forthcoming Rebecca: Biography of a Novel (MUP: 2026).

Murdoch aficionados will know her as the co-editor of Iris Murdoch and Morality and Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts both from Palgrave – and the co-editor of Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 from Chatto and Windus (2015).

Long-time listeners of the podcast will remember that Avril was one of my guests on ‘Iris Murdoch for Beginners’ so who better to be today’s guest as we discuss mid-twentieth century Gothic fiction and put Murdoch into conversation with both Daphne du Maurier and Barbara Comyns.

In this episode Miles is joined by Jil Evans and Charles Taliaferro (St. Olaf College, Minnesota, USA) to discuss their new book, 'Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent'. We cover love, ethics, mora illumination, gender, vision and the will and much more!

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdoch-and-the-Transcendent-by-Charles-Taliaferro-Jil-Evans/9781009631594

Jil Evans is an abstract artist and author whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is held in private and museum collections throughout the United States, including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Flaten Art Museum, and Halle Ford Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, which include a Jerome Foundation Grant, Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a Pew Grant to study and paint Italy, and residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has co-authored three books with Charles Taliaferro.

Charles Taliaferro is Emeritus professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Faithful Research, and a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of twenty books, most recently The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism and the Imagination, co-authored with the American artist Jil Evans. He has been a visiting scholar or guest lecturer at a large number of universities, including Brown, Cambridge, Notre Dame, Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Chicago.[1][2][3] Since 2013 Taliaferro is editor-in-chief of the journal Open Theology. He is the author of over twenty books in theology and philosophy of religion.

In this episode Miles is joined by Cathy Mason (Central European University, Vienna) to discuss her new book, 'Iris Murdoch's Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real, and the Good'.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdochs-Moral-Philosophy-by-Cathy-Mason/9780198940432

Cathy Mason is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Central European University, Vienna and her main areas of research interest are Ethics, Epistemology (especially Moral Epistemology), Aesthetics, and Iris Murdoch's philosophical writing (particularly at the points where these areas converge). Her previous work has focused on the moral phenomena of everyday life, often drawing on virtue theory. She has written about a variety of topics such as friendship, love, mourning, forgiveness, hope and humility. Prior to coming to CEU, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge – where she studied for her PhD - and taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham.

In this episode we are returning to our close reading of the collection Existentialists and Mystics. For the third podcast of our mini-series, we’ll be discussing Murdoch's review of Gabriel Marcel’s ‘The Image of Mind’ and her essay ‘The Existential Political Myth’. The first is a review of The Mystery of Being by Marcel from 1951 – the first volume of his published volume of Gifford Lectures. Murdoch’s essay 'The Existential Political Myth' was first published in Socratic Digest in 1952.

Joining me today is Samuel Filby who was the guest on the first episode of this mini series. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on Murdoch at Northwestern University, Chicago. His work focuses on Murdoch’s aesthetics and moral psychology.

In this 75th Episode Special, Miles is joined by Daniel Read (Kingston University, UK) to answer questions from the Iris Murdoch Society and via the social media channels.

You can find out much more, and join the society, here: www.irismurdochsociety.org.uk

The questions sent in are:

1. Could Iris Murdoch drive?
2. How should Murdoch’s philosophical seriousness be reassessed in light of recent scholarship on her as a public intellectual?
3. In what ways did Murdoch’s Irish background shape her imagination, ethics, and sense of exile or belonging?
4. How has Murdoch’s relationship with religion and the sacred been represented differently in scholarship versus media portrayals?
5. How should Murdoch’s private life—especially her complex relationships—be integrated (or resisted) in critical interpretations of her novels?
6. What is Murdoch’s place within post-war British women’s writing, and why has she often been treated as an exception rather than part of a continuum?
7. How do contemporary debates about feminism, agency, and power reframe Murdoch’s representation of women?
8. Murdoch insists on the reality of the Good as something external and authoritative.
How might that claim speak to contemporary moral and political life, where moral language is often treated as subjective or unstable?
9. Murdoch’s late novels are often described as difficult, bewildering, even radically alien.
How should we read the strangeness of the late Murdoch: as decline, experiment, or metaphysical intensification?
10. What do you think is the most important unfinished task for Murdoch scholarship today?