IRIS MURDOCH’S FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK
MURDOCH, Iris.
Sartre. Romantic Rationalist.
Cambridge, Bowes & Bowes, 1953.
8vo, pp. 78; a very good copy in the original publisher’s red cloth, gilt lettering to spine, upper edge painted red; preserving the original printed red, black and white dust jacket, unclipped; minor chips to spine extremities and along the top edge, spine lightly sunned; pencil ownership inscription of philosopher and writer Francis Sparshott (1926–2015) to front pastedown.
First edition, the first published book of Iris Murdoch, in her capacity as a fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
It had been an encounter with Camus in 1945 that had kindled her determination to become a philosopher: his first presentation, in Brussels, of the lecture ‘Is Existentialism a Humanism?’ proved to Murdoch ‘bracing, an invitation to take responsibility for the world in the aftermath of war … a philosophy of vigor & action … denuding. Stimulating’ (Lipscomb, pp. 107–8). In publishing this book, the earliest monograph study of Sartre in English, some years later, Murdoch considered Sartre’s views on relationships, freedom and politics and took an unflinchingly critical stance to what she had come to see as a Romantic view, ultimately self-indulgent, as well as issue- rather than people-driven, and therefore suited more to a playwright than a novelist.
See Lipscomb, The Women are up to Something, (2021).
