MURDOCH, Iris (1919–1999)

Two signed invoices for numerous books purchased, with a manuscript request

1966/7

2 single sheets of printed and typed invoice paper, with manuscript additions, 252 x 164mm

Essay

A pair of invoices from Eric and Joan Stevens, Booksellers, of Prospect Road, London, for books purchased by the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. The first invoice, dated 18 April 1966, shows Murdoch’s wide interests, with works by Kropotkin and Schopenhauer alongside a biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s Hindu View of Life, Frank Norman’s prison memoir Bang to Rights and an assortment of others. (Freud’s Basic Writings and Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols already sold.)

The second invoice, dated just over a year later, reports ‘no Pushkin in stock’, to which Murdoch has responded ‘Cd you let me know of anything which you get in about, as well as by, Pushkin?’ Presumably this inquiry was made on behalf of her husband John Bayley, whose Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary was published in 1971.

Murdoch was one of the foremost philosophers of her era, and was also an extremely successful novelist. At the time of these purchases Murdoch’s writing career was in full flow, and, perhaps of greater moment, she was in the process of composing the central essay in her landmark volume The Sovereignty of Good. Schopenhauer is perhaps an unacknowledged influence on the latter – there is, for example, a consonance between their ideas of immediate moral feeling, of the important relationship between aesthetics and experience, and the need to escape individual desire and prejudice. Certainly by the time of Murdoch’s great Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) the relationship to Schopenhauer is explicit and profound. Might its origins be found in these attractive pieces of early ephemera?

Condition

Very good condition; flattened folds, and a few marks