“The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.”

Irish and British novelist and philosopher

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Born in 1919 and active in the twentieth century, she is known for fiction that explored moral choice, desire, good and evil, and the hidden workings of the mind. Her first novel, Under the Net, appeared in 1954 and was later named by Modern Library among the best English-language novels of the century. The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. She was made a Dame in 1987 for services to literature, and her work was later placed high on lists of major British writers.