She used to write novels.

Iris Murdoch
A Life
Peter J. Conradi
W. W. Norton and Co., $35, 706 pp.

There was never any good biography of a good novelist," confided Scott Fitzgerald to his notebooks. "There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he is any good." Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was a very good novelist, and certainly seems many people. Over her life she had ascribed to her many qualities--goodness, kindness, strangeness, shyness, simplicity, naivete, high seriousness, imagination, generosity, lay sainthood are just a few. But she could also be cruel, feckless, detached, indecisive, jealous, touchy, vain. In 1944, aged twenty-five, she wrote, not in jest, "I am afraid I am not yet really eligible for inclusion among the harlots of history," while conducting three affaires (her word) simultaneously. Four years later she added: "One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone."

Besides books of philosophy and poetry, she wrote twenty-six novels and four plays while working in the Treasury department, for Austrian refugee camps, and, for over a decade, as an Oxford don (from which post she resigned after a lesbian affair with a student). Conradi's biography describes her life as "full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers, and philosophers of her time." She is a marvelous subject for a book.

In 1980 I offered her neighbor and fellow novelist A. N. Wilson a contract to write her biography, and he was happy with the commission, as was she, despite her initial dismay. After some months of research, Wilson came to see me to say that he would like to publish two versions of her life--one, for while her husband John Bayley was still alive; the other, detailing Iris's affairs with Elias Canetti and Brigid Brophy, only later. His reticence was unnecessary: Bayley has not only penned two autobiographical works about his and Iris's lives, but has given his consent to the current film about her and this biography, which describes the Canetti and Brophy relationships in full. It is sad that Wilson has not completed his own work, not least because Bayley and Conradi brought considerable pressure on both him and his publishers (I had long since moved on) not to do so. Conradi writes that he wanted to write the first book about her (the culmination of twenty-one years' involvement), but not the last; so maybe Wilson's book will yet appear.

In the meantime, Conradi's biography is a more than useful beginning. He has been given unfettered access to Murdoch's papers, and his list of acknowledgements is impressive. Some of his portraits are especially well done--Murdoch's dictatorial headmistress, Beatrice May Baker, her Oxford philosophy tutor, Donald MacKinnon, with whom she felt herself in love; the man she expected to marry, Frank Thompson, killed in the war; the Svengali-like Canetti himself. But the helping hand of Bayley exerts too firm a grip: one senses Conradi looking for his approbation, keen to show himself a valued insider. The biography is dedicated to Bayley, just as Bayley's Elegy for Iris is to Conradi: no intrinsic harm in that, but a biographer can get too close. An evident labor of love, this book is weighed down by superfluous detailing (the contents of a picnic, lists of irrelevant companions) and by constant small repetitions. Iris means "Goddess of Rainbows" and Murdoch "navigator": Conradi could have done with both better direction and more color.

Nonetheless, Murdoch herself comes alive in all her contradictions. Her schooldays at Badminton are well captured (though her initial unhappiness there was likely due to what a school contemporary--unquoted by Conradi-- called "her turning up several weeks late, and smelling": only someone who has experienced British boarding school can appreciate the unkind truth of that memory). Equally atmospheric are Murdoch's days at Oxford, her time in the Communist Party, and her growing realization of her extraordinary talents. There are good stories, and good details: I liked all her many early paintings showing ladders. Those who met her, men and women, regularly fell under her spell, and it is not hard to do so as a reader. On leaving Oxford (with a first-class degree) she wrote to Frank Thompson how she now wanted to "learn jujitsu, German, translate Sophocles, learn to draw decently, buy expensive and crazy presents for my friends, really go into the subject of comparative mythology, read many very basic books about politics, learn about America, psychology, animals, my God I could go on for ever."

I remember reading all her novels (up to then) in one gulp in my early twenties, and asked a friend, then in her late eighties, whether Murdoch's fictional world was really like life--the incredible coincidences, the small groups of people caught up in convoluted ties of love and hate, Eros ruling all. Was that how people were? "You'll learn," she said quietly. And of course I did--and should have expected Murdoch's own life to have been just as tortuous and wrenching as the lives of her fictional creations.

Murdoch's many loves--including Michael Foot, Asa Briggs, David Hicks, Canetti, Tom Balogh, and, of course, Bayley himself--are exhaustively described, with much new information, particularly from her own letters and journals. Conradi is good on the older lovers, who generally ended up hurting her, and the gentle, childlike ones, such as Thompson and Bayley: she needed both kinds. "She was to make of the relations of Eros and intelligence a whole philosophy," he writes. That philosophy is the background to much of the second half of the book, as Murdoch abandoned communism for existentialism, later Anglo-Catholicism, then Buddhism. But she was never a simple follower of any one doctrine. "My trouble is that I am obsessed with my soul," she admitted, a confession of both her self-absorption and her high earnestness. The great Catholic writers of the British Isles of the last century are Greene, Waugh, Golding, Spark, and (possibly) Burgess. Murdoch, more than any of those five, concerned herself with the meaning of goodness, how to live properly, how to understand suffering.

Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1997. Conradi makes his account of her last two years as moving as one might expect, more so than the filmed version. She would copy out in a faltering hand, on lined paper, letter after unfinished letter, beginning, "My dear, I am now going away for some time. I hope you will be well." At a party a few months before, she had put her arm around a friend and fellow novelist and said, matter-of-factly, "I used to write novels."

Richard Cohen is a freelance book editor and writer. Random House will publish his book on the history of swordplay in the fall.