Literary reputation is a fascinating thing: how it waxes and wanes. The long shelf of the 20th century positively sags with books by writers whose names are already within an inch of being forgotten, whose publishers now struggle to shift their once acclaimed and bestselling titles, or even to keep them in print. After the biography has been delivered – and let us pray it arrives throbbing with love affairs – a library hush sets in. The estate must scrabble around a bit: perhaps the journals will prove a minor hit, or the juvenilia, stuck between hard covers with a few previously unseen photographs. Or what about the letters? Everyone loves a witty letter. Can’t some professor with a sabbatical to take zip between Texas and Oxford and gather them all up?
Iris Murdoch ticks all these boxes. Celebrated in her lifetime, the diminution of her achievements began – as she had feared it would – soon after her death in 1999, helped on its way by her husband, the Oxford academic John Bayley, who revealed to the world her Alzheimer’s disease and thus put her sprawling later novels in a different light. In 2001, Peter J Conradi published an authorised biography, and in 2003, AN Wilson, a friend, gave us an “anti-biography”; both detailed her affairs with men and women, and the former was much praised. After this, however, quiet fell. Murdoch still has her fans and, aware of their endangered species status, they can be extremely ardent. But it’s undeniable that she’s little read now. Something about her emotionally frantic world – its archness, its paradoxical want of feeling – fails to connect with 21st-century readers.
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