Irish-born British philosopher and novelist — one of the few serious thinkers of the 20th century who produced a first-rank body of work in both disciplines, and the writer who, almost alone in mid-century Anglophone philosophy, took moral seriousness as a philosophical subject at a time the field was dominated by linguistic analysis. Murdoch read Greats at Oxford, worked at UNRWA in postwar Europe, and wrote Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) — the first book-length English study of Sartre, whose existentialism she had encountered in Brussels in 1945 and which, though she came to criticize it sharply, shaped everything that followed.
Her philosophical masterwork is the series of essays collected as The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and the later Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). The core argument: morality is not fundamentally about choice (as Sartre held) or about prescription (as Hare held) but about attention — the slow, patient, loving effort to see what is actually there, free from the fantasies in which the self habitually encloses what it looks at. The Good, in a Platonic sense she recovered via Simone Weil, is the magnetic center toward which genuine attention moves. Moral progress is "the progressive revealing of a reality to be accepted with patience and love."
Her twenty-six novels — from Under the Net (1954) through Jackson's Dilemma (1995) — stage the same moral problematic in fiction. The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Sea, The Sea (1978, Booker Prize), and The Good Apprentice (1985) are probably the durable ones. She slid into Alzheimer's disease in the mid-1990s, a decline her husband John Bayley chronicled in three controversial memoirs that have somewhat obscured the work she actually did.