The Iris Trilogy Iris, , Iris and the Friends , Widower's House

John Bayley

Wry intelligent and unexpectedly hilarious THE IRIS TRILOGY is an unforgettable inquiry into the nature of love and identity and a uniquely moving articulation of loss.

John Bayley's account of his long and loving marriage to the great novelist Iris Murdoch takes us from their love affair's comical beginnings at Oxford in the early 50s (Bayley courted Iris on account of her unchallenging plain looks and their first date consisted of a revolting dinner followed by a disastrous dance when Iris sprained her ankle) to its slow and painful closure when Iris developed Alzheimer's forty years later to a searching analysis of the condition of bereavement and how he built a life for himself after Iris's death. Yet as Bayley charts the gradual dissolution of Iris's remarkable intellect side by side with the detail of their gloriously eccentric and profoundly satisfying life together what emerges is the complex portrait of an enigmatic and brilliant woman and of a marriage of quite extraordinary unforced happiness and some remarkable insight into the richly mysterious symbolism of Iris Murdoch's novels.