‘THE AFTERMATH EXPERIENCED BEFORE’: AESCHYLEAN UNTIMELINESS AND IRIS MURDOCH’S DEFENCE OF ART Mathura Umachandran This year marks the centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch (1919–99). 1 She has been celebrated as one of Britain’s most important postwar writers with twenty- six prose fiction novels to her name. 2 Murdoch was also an ancient philosopher who was primarily interested in issues of moral philosophy. Pinning down her place in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, however, is not a straightforward task. 3 On the one hand she cut a conventional figure, holding a tutorial fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963. 4 On the other hand, her philosophical writing increasingly departed from the coordinates of analytical philosophy. 5 As Martha Nussbaum notes in her deeply ambivalent With thanks to Norah Perkins at Curtis Brown for kind permission to reproduce ‘Agamemnon Class, 1939’ in this venue, as well as to Dayna Miller and Anne Rowe at the Iris Murdoch Archive (Univer- sity of Kingston) and Julian Reid at the Corpus Christi College Archive (University of Oxford). Lucy Bolton and Constanze Güthenke provided support at crucial moments. This article started life as a con- ference presentation at the Women Classical Committee’s panel ‘Foremothers on the Frontline’ at the Classical Association meeting 2017 at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and is much improved for the discussions there. With thanks to Helen Morales for editorial support throughout, to Ja  s Elsner, Ella Haselswerdt and the anonymous reviewers at Ramus for their constructive criticism. 1. Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 but was educated, worked, and lived most of her life in England. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, (1938–42) and Newnham College, Cambridge, (1947–48). She published her first novel Under the Net in 1954. Murdoch taught philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, between 1948 and 1963. Her last academic appointment was at the Royal College of Art, teaching there between 1963 and 1967. Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) was her final pub- lished novel. Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997. She died in Oxford in 1999. 2. Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1987. She received literary recognition during her lifetime: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince, the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. There have been extraordinary celebrations of her centenary both academic (see the conference that took place in her honour at St Anne’s College Oxford [July 13–15, 2019]), and in the literary press, for example, The Times Literary Supplement, ‘What does Iris Murdoch Mean to you now’ www.thetls. co.uk/articles/public/irismurdochtls (July 9; last accessed August 7, 2019). Despite these incontrovert- ible markers of Murdoch’s cultural regard, her place in the literary canon is marked by ambivalence; see Turner (2007). 3. As an indicator of Murdoch’s exclusion from the philosophical canon, she does not have her own entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy though she is cited in the entries for Philippa Foot and Simone Weil. 4. Murdoch resigned from this position in 1962 for personal reasons. See Horner and Rowe (2015), 170. 5. In the last two decades there has been a turn to reassess Murdoch’s philosophy (Antonaccio [2003], Antonaccio [2012], Broackes [2012a]). Broackes (2012b), 19–21, argues that, where others in Murdoch’s milieu (Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe) are accepted as part of postwar British philosophy, Murdoch is positioned as a marginal figure because her engagement with Simone Weil took her far from the path of academic philosophy. Altorf (2011) argues that the gossipy biographical tradition of Murdoch has limited intellectual engagement Ramus 48 (2) p.223–247 © Ramus 2020. doi:10.1017/rmu.2019.18 223 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/rmu.2019.18 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 24 Aug 2020 at 09:14:36, subject to the Cambridge Core