Editing Iris Murdoch (section)

==Political views==
Murdoch won a scholarship to study at [[Vassar College]] in the US in 1946, but was refused a visa because she had joined the [[Communist Party of Great Britain]] in 1938, while a student at Oxford. She left the party in 1942, when she went to work at the Treasury, but remained sympathetic to communism for several years.<ref name=Conradi2001/>{{rp|172}}<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Todd | first1 = Richard | title = Iris Murdoch | publisher = Methuen | year = 1984 | location = London | isbn = 0416354203 | quote = Here, like many other intellectuals in the 1930s, she became a member of the Communist Party; she later resigned in disillusion, but remained for a long time close to the Left. | url = https://archive.org/details/irismurdoch0000todd }}</ref>{{rp|15}} In later years she was allowed to visit the United States, but always had to obtain a waiver from the provisions of the [[Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952#Provisions|McCarran Act]], which barred Communist Party members and former members from entering the country. In a 1990 ''[[Paris Review]]'' interview, she said that her membership of the Communist Party had made her see "how strong and how awful it [Marxism] is, certainly in its organized form".<ref>{{cite magazine | title = Iris Murdoch: The Art of Fiction No. 117 |magazine=[[The Paris Review]] | date = Summer 1990 | first = Jeffrey | last = Meyers | issue = 115 | pages = 206–224 | url = http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2313/the-art-of-fiction-no-117-iris-murdoch | access-date = 20 June 2012 | quote = But it was just as well, in a way, to have seen the inside of Marxism because then one realizes how strong and how awful it is, certainly in its organized form. | url-status = live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120630133530/http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2313/the-art-of-fiction-no-117-iris-murdoch | archive-date = 30 June 2012 }}</ref>{{rp|210}}

Aside from her Communist Party membership, her Irish heritage is the sensitive aspect of Murdoch's political life that has attracted interest. Part of the interest revolves around the fact that, although Irish by both birth and traced descent on both sides, Murdoch did not display the full set of political opinions that are sometimes assumed to go with this origin. Biographer Peter Conradi wrote: "No one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris's Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish ... [But] Iris has as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North Americans have to call themselves American".<ref name=Conradi2001/>{{rp|24}} Conradi notes {{nowrap|A. N. Wilson's}} record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause she had given earlier in ''[[The Red and the Green]]'', and a competing defence of the book at [[Caen]] in 1978.<ref name=Conradi2001/>{{rp|465}} The novel, while broad of sympathy, is hardly an unambiguous celebration of the 1916 rising, dwelling upon bloodshed, unintended consequences and the evils of romanticism, besides celebrating selfless individuals on both sides. Later, of [[Ian Paisley]], Murdoch stated "[he] sincerely condemns violence and did not intend to incite the Protestant terrorists. That he is emotional and angry is not surprising, after 12–15 years of murderous [[Irish_Republican_Army|IRA]] activity. All this business is deep in my soul, I'm afraid."<ref name=Conradi2001/>{{rp|465}} In private correspondence with her close friend and fellow philosopher [[Philippa Foot]], she remarked in 1978 that she felt "unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred" and, of a Franco-Irish conference she had attended in Caen in 1982, said that "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".<ref>{{cite news | first = Mark | last = Brown | title = Iris Murdoch Letters Reveal Love for Close Friend Philippa Foot | date = 31 August 2012 | url = https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/31/irish-murdoch-letters-philippa-foot | newspaper = [[The Guardian]] | access-date = 4 September 2012 | url-status = live | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20141008201658/http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/31/irish-murdoch-letters-philippa-foot | archive-date = 8 October 2014 }}</ref>