Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch and an enduring love affair

The release of the novelist's letters to the philosopher Philippa Foot made headlines for the wrong reasons. They are not a chronicle of lesbian attachment, but an insight into an unconventional author, argues Anne Chisholm

Anne Chisholm

Thursday 6 September 2012

In The Black Prince, her great novel about the perils of love, Iris Murdoch has her main character say: "What dangerous machines letters are: perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence." She was herself a recklessly prolific correspondent who destroyed quantities of letters she received but left many of her own behind; and over the last 10 days the truth of those lines has been well demonstrated, with the news that some 250 of her letters to her lifelong friend, the moral philosopher Philippa Foot, have been made public by Kingston University. With depressing predictability, and ignoring a careful press release, newspaper headlines announced "Iris Murdoch's 60-year lesbian relationship with her best friend and lover revealed".

My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre

Iris Murdoch with her husband John Bayley.
 Photograph: Eammon Mccabe for the Guardian

My hero: 

John BAyley by Richard Eyre

Bayley was a marvellous writer, a great critic and wonderful company. Some criticised him for writing about the illness of his wife, Iris Murdoch. But he said: ‘Iris would have approved’

Richard Eyre
Thu 22 Jan 2015

I

got to know John Bayley, whose death was reported this week, when I made the film Iris, based on his two memoirs of his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her decline and death from Alzheimer’s. I found him enchanting: highly intelligent, of course, a sharp and entirely accessible literary critic but, rarer still, a marvellous writer and wonderful company. Some criticised him for writing his account of his wife’s illness: they were people who had never lived with someone with Alzheimer’s. Of his memoirs Bayley said: “Iris would have approved.” I believe she would. He was eccentric, droll and, in my experience, undeviatingly honest.