Iris Murdoch and art course 2024

Live online course
Sundays, 16 March to 11 May 2025, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British Time

'I believe in Salvation by art'  – Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch is an intensely visual writer who, when searching for inspiration, would regularly visit art galleries across the world. From Frans Hal's Laughing Cavalier in her first novel Under the Net through to Rembrandt's The Polish Rider in her penultimate novel The Green Knight, art and artists populate her fiction. The art works remind the reader of the need to take art seriously; that art was for life's sake, not its own.

In this new course, Miles Leeson will discuss five novels in which Murdoch centres key scenes, or indeed the entire narrative, around a classical work of art. Each lecture will take a novel and its corresponding artwork as a starting point for discussion and consider Murdoch's ideas of love, transcendence, spirituality and connection in relation to her own non-fictional writings (philosophy, poetry, letters, journal entries) to provide a substantive overview of her lifelong obsession with art and the moral life.

Live online course: five lectures and seminars, Sundays, fortnightly, 16 March to 11 May 2025, 6.00 to 8.00 pm.

Dr Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, UK. He has previously led courses on Murdoch's London, Murdoch's Gothic, and Murdoch and Love for Literature Cambridge. This is our fourth annual Murdoch course.