Born in Dublin, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Murdoch became Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford in 1948. She is best known as a novelist, but her philosophical writings begin with Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953) and include The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics and Morals (1992). As in many of her novels, she has been centrally concerned philosophically to explore the place of religious thought and morality as Platonic bulwarks against an apparently fragmented and meaningless world.