Iris Murdoch letters reveal love for close friend Philippa Foot (original) (raw)

Iris Murdoch's profound love for one of her closest friends – and, for a while, her lover – the philosopher Philippa Foot, are revealed in a collection of letters acquired by a British archive with £107,000 of lottery money. Kingston University's Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies now owns 250 letters written by Murdoch to Foot from the 1940s to the 1990s.

The pair met while they were students at Oxford and had a brief affair in the 1960s. Their friendship was tempestuous and they fell out for some time. One letter from Murdoch concerns a reconciliation in 1959: "Thank you for your letter. It said what I would most have wished it to say. Losing you and losing you in that way, was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. I hope very much that we can now recapture something. I have thought of you so much in these years, and dreamed painfully of you too. I would certainly wish only to speak to you from the heart."

Philippa Foot. Photograph: Steve Pyke/Getty Images

In 1968, the year their relationship became more physical, Murdoch wrote: "Sometimes I feel I have to invent a language to talk to you in, though my heart is very full of definite things to say. You stir some very deep part of my soul. Be patient with me and don't be angry with my peculiarities. I love you very much."

Three months later, she wrote thanking Foot for a gift: "My dear, thank you so much for the exotic Olympian stockings! I love being given stockings by you. It is quite a tradition – & one feels the gift of stockings is deeply significant."

Murdoch was born in Dublin and the letters also shine a light on her views on Ireland. One from 1978 reads: "We are going briefly to France for a conference on Irish literature! It will be interesting to see if the French are sentimental about Ireland. I feel unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred. It is a terrible country. I can't say that in public of course … MUCH LOVE, my dear."

Another, in 1982, reads: "We have just been in France (Caen) at a Franco-Irish conference. It was nice being in Normandy, but the sounds of all those Irish voices made me feel privately sick. They just couldn't help sympathising with the IRA, like Americans do. A mad bad world. Write to me. Don't work too hard. Play a bit! Salute the sea from me – I hardly ever see it. Je pense a toi. Very best NEW YEAR wishes and much love, my dear, I."

Anne Rowe, the centre's director, said the letters provided rare insight into Murdoch's private life and thoughts. "They hold particular human interest because of the intense personal relationship between the two women," she said. "They went through all the ups and downs of friendship together, but remained very close for six decades and, in the final stages of Murdoch's illness, Philippa was one of the very few people, apart from Murdoch's husband, with whom she could be left alone without becoming agitated."

Murdoch wrote 26 novels, including the Booker-winning The Sea, the Sea. In her final years she battled with Alzheimer's, a struggle documented in her husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris, on which the film Iris was based.

The purchase adds to a Murdoch archive now thought to be the most extensive anywhere, and averts the possibility of such collections going to literary archives in the US.A major exhibition celebrating the lives and work of Murdoch and Foot – a renowned philosopher who died aged 90 in 2010 – is planned for May next year.