 Murdoch’s family was middle class (her father was a civil servant) and Irish Protestant (an identity that remained important to Murdoch throughout her life). They moved to London from Ireland when Murdoch was very young. Murdoch attended Oxford University, overlapping with three other women—Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—at a time (1938–1942) when many male students were away at war. Foot, Murdoch, and Midgley all became prominent and influential moral philosophers, and Anscombe a prominent philosopher of action and a student, friend, translator and interpreter of Wittgenstein.