Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire - Hardcover

Bayley, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039304856X ISBN 13: 9780393048568

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Synopsis

The husband of Iris Murdoch and author of Elegy for Iris, follows up his moving memoir of his wife's struggle with memory loss by recalling his own past, describing vivid scenes of his childhood in colonial India, his vacations on the English coast, his early love of literature, and his romance with Iris.

About this title

Review:

Novelist Iris Murdoch died in 1999 after a three-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, writer John Bayley, who wrote movingly of the impact of her illness in Elegy for Iris, tells in this book of the final year of his wife's life, when she was visited more by her own imaginary "friends" than by the exigencies of real life. In Iris and Her Friends, Bayley recalls his own increasingly precarious hold on reality and subsequent breakdown, Murdoch's final happy weeks in a home for the terminally ill, and finally her quiet death. Although closely linked to Elegy, Iris and Her Friends focuses more on Bayley's experience of Murdoch's illness: the memories he discovered just as his wife lost her own--of his childhood, his army years and first loves, and of their long marriage. One of Bayley's "friends" is a subject he holds dear: "The old Eng. Lit. again. I taught it for nearly fifty years and feel detached from it now." Nonetheless, literature emerges here as the one remaining constant in his life. Scarcely two pages go by without a reference, almost involuntary, to Hardy, Coleridge, Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Thurber, James, Lawrence, Woolf--or Murdoch. Sometimes Murdoch appears to respond to the shared literary in-jokes, but more often the pair are like "two animals pushing together, nudging and grooming each other, grunting together as they bask in a mutual doze." This is an incredibly intimate glimpse into a personal life, but as Bayley tellingly observes: "There is a surreal sense in which Alzheimer's has turned Iris herself into art. She is my Iris no longer, but a person in the public domain." --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Born in India in 1925, John Bayley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He became a fellow of New College in 1955, where he taught English. In 1956, he married the novelist Iris Murdoch, who was then teaching philosophy at St. Anne's College. Bayley is an eminent literary critic and the author of Iris and Her Friends and Elegy for Iris. He has since remarried. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and an active supporter of Alzheimer's International, Bayley still lives and writes in Oxford, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 039304856X
• ISBN 13: 9780393048568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275