Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (/'me: rdak/MUR-dok; 15 July 1919-8 February 1999) was a novelist and philosopher of Irish and British origin. She was born in Dublin but grew up in London. Iris Murdoch was the daughter of a wealthy family who owned a textile business. She had two siblings: a brother, John; and a sister, Philippa. When she was five years old, her family moved to Scotland so they could escape the poverty of early twentieth-century London. They settled in a small town near Edinburgh called Craigmount. Iris learned to speak Scottish Gaelic here. She studied at several universities including Oxford where she read philosophy. But she abandoned her studies to marry English writer and artist Lawrence Olivier. The couple had one son together but were divorced after just four years of marriage. She then married Lord David Murdoch, an aristocrat nine years her senior. He was also divorced with one son. Together, the three of them had a daughter. Iris became more and more interested in religious ideas and eventually converted to Catholicism. She returned to Britain and lived as a Catholic nun for several years before retiring from this life. Iris Murdoch was one of the most important philosophers of imagination in modern literature.