Iris was 20 and had been at Somerville for a year Philippa Bosanquet was a year younger. They met in Oxford in the autumn of 1939, as the war was starting. Philippa called Iris, after her death, "the light of my life". "Essential you" was how Iris described her friend. The affair quietly ended they remained close and loving friends for another 30 years. Soon, as Philippa explained to Conradi, they realised that their feeling for each other was "not best expressed" in that way. Iris and Philippa did not have a 60-year affair, although there was a brief period around 1968 when their friendship became physical. Friendship, to my mind, is an undervalued and under-explored subject, often treated as a less important, tepid version of romantic or erotic love. I have been planning to write a book about friendship, and after Peter Conradi's biography of Murdoch came out in 1991 I knew that her relationship with Philippa Foot would form part of it. To me she remains a great writer, whose reputation has been overshadowed by details of her private life and decline into Alzheimer's. I never met Foot, but knew of her work as a leading moral philosopher Murdoch I knew slightly, but her novels have absorbed, entertained and educated me since I first read them in the 1960s. With depressing predictability, and ignoring a careful press release, newspaper headlines announced "Iris Murdoch's 60-year lesbian relationship with her best friend and lover revealed".Īs it happens, I have been studying that friendship between two brilliant and remarkable women and have had access to the whole correspondence. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence." She was herself a recklessly prolific correspondent who destroyed quantities of letters she received but left many of her own behind and over the last 10 days the truth of those lines has been well demonstrated, with the news that some 250 of her letters to her lifelong friend, the moral philosopher Philippa Foot, have been made public by Kingston University. I n The Black Prince, her great novel about the perils of love, Iris Murdoch has her main character say: "What dangerous machines letters are: perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion.
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