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Summary: A Little Gem
Review: This book is heartbreakingly beautiful. Bayley loved his wife, Iris Murdoch, so deeply, and on so many levels and that love comes across beautifully in this book. Bayley brings us into the intimate private world that he and Murdoch shared. As a longtime fan of Iris Murdoch, I am thankful for the insight into her life and her work. This book is very personal, so much so that I don't think it can be read in one sitting, but rather should be savoured slowly and deliberately. I remember the sadness I felt hearing that she had Altzheimer's and then hearing that she died. This book brings back that sadness, but it comes back stronger because it also brings John Bayley's sadness. That is not to say that this book is a "downer" on any level. Quite the contrary. John Bayley has constructed a beautiful book focused mainly on his love for his wife, and how the love between them grew, from his first sighting of her riding a bicycle to the time when he wrote this book, as she was suffering from the ravages of the disease.
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Summary: A small masterpiece
Review: This book is the story of a marriage, a life together of two enormously intelligent writers, John Bayley and Iris Murdoch. Bayley tells the story of their forty - two years of marriage at the same time he describes more closely the four last years in which Iris Murdoch suffered from Alzheimer's. He writes with humor and quiet understanding, and his obvious admiration and love for his wife speak throughout the work.
The cruelty of Alzheimer's is somehow underlined when the one who suffers is a person of extraordinary mind , a devotee of the life of the mind . Bayley honestly and painfully portays the strange kind of blankness and absence which the Alzheimer sufferer often displays. He does this against a background of the story of two lives, each of one has been lived in part in the great solitude of outstanding creator endeavor. But he also very good relating their shared experiences.
Bayley is also tactful and restrained about a certain assymetry in their relation, relating probably much more to the early years when Iris was involved with others. One nonetheless feels Bayley's restrained anger in his description of the ' master figure ' who for a time seemed to be a center of Murdoch's intellectual life.
What however impresses and makes this work remarkable is the steady gaze of love and intelligence with which Bayley sees , envelopes and protects Murdoch . This book is a work of love and pain, and of great beauty. It also provides much valuable insight into that terrible condition when the person is physically present but mentally lost.
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Summary: This book basis for Dan Rather's Valentine Message
Review: This book served as the basis for an op-ed piece by Dan Rather (CBS Evening News) that appeared in the Houston Chronicle on Valentine's Day, 1999.Elegy for Iris' celebrates heroism of married life By DAN RATHER"MY wife, Jean, and I and a few friends have been passing around a little book called Elegy for Iris (St. Martin's Press, 1999). It is about married love." [I dare not reproduce more of this piece for fear of a copyright infringement. Go to the web site to read the complete article.] Rather conclusion includes the words: "I want to report to you that there is, right now at your library or bookstore, a book whose main characters are heroic just because they are married to each other. In another husband's memoir, I find my mother and father, my wife's parents, our friends and us."
Rating: 
Summary: A warm glimpse into Iris the person...
Review: This is a warm, gentle, sweet-hearted devotional to the great writer by her husband, who clearly was (is) genuinely in love with this wife of 40 years. Bayley's writing is literate and engaging, and it well conveys the spirit of both Murdoch's writing and her imagination. It is interesting to get a sense of Iris the person (apparently as original and oddly ungraspable as the characters and narratives of her novels), and it would have been nice to get more information about her along these lines. The marriage depicted has a flavor that is tweedy, intellectual, quaintly innocent, and gently eccentric in a veddy British way. The only weaknesses for me were the author's occasional extended digressions about his own views on literature, and the resulting sense of wanting a more intensive and penetrating focus on Iris Murdoch herself. Overall, the book is a cozy, enjoyable, undemanding little read that really engages your heart and your imagination.
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Summary: for better or worse ...
Review: This is a wonderfully well-written story about what it means to love someone for better or worse.
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Summary: Touching, conversational
Review: This slim volume is a touching account of one human being's love for another. The story of the unconventional love that John and Iris share is explained in the first part of the book, while the second part deals more with how John copes with Iris's illness. The tender regard that John holds for Iris, even as she surrenders to the symptoms of Alzheimer's, is inspiring. Even as he describes his love's dementia, childishness, and helplessness, John exhibits a rare and enduring love for his mate. He is always respectful to her, always cognizant of her sweet nature, always in love. Although this book is short, it is not a quick read. One must dwell on the words and emotions in the book to fully enjoy them.
Rating: 
Summary: "Elegy for Reader" is a more accurate title.
Review: Though well written and fabulously voiced with vivid literary allusions, this book fails to be moving, or even meet its perceived goals and objectives. It is not an elegy for Iris, as the title implies, but a long, drawn out lamentation for poor author John Bayley. The book does a good job of making a chronicle of Bayley's and Murdoch's life together, but does not immortalize or draw sympathy for Iris. Bayley sadly neglects his wife's battle's with Alzheimer's Disease, lacking creativity and imagination in describing her endeavors and battle with the illness, and instead focuses on how great their past was. I am oh so impressed with Bayley's education and Iris's genius, but felt the book was condescending to the reader, unfocused, and a disgrace to the struggles of Iris and John under the harsh consequences of a deadly disease.
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Summary: A sly and fascinating insight into an unusual friendship
Review: When one considers that John Bayley can write ANYTHING about his wife, Iris Murdoch, because she will never be able to read his words, what he chose to write is fascinating. First of all his modesty: he remains an admiring swain to the end of the book, taking very seriously the job of adding to the world's knowledge of his famous wife. Yet I ended the book thinking that I would like very much to meet this man. He makes me think of the male companion in the Miss Marple series, supportive and not resentful about his place in the background.He quietly brings up instances where he believes that his insights helped Iris with her fiction, but he needn't have even done so. By the end of the book, it is obvious why she must have valued the relationship. Besides the scenes of daily life in the working lives of the couple,this book offers comfort to anyone who has loved a person and has experienced that person's decline from dementia. The manner in which Bayley talks about married solitude and then contrasts this with the bondage of 24-hour care for the declining Murdoch left me feeling for the first time that I could begin to understand how love can transform the people involved. It was a wonderful book. I'm only sorry I didn't know about Bayley before, and I hope that he lives to write more about his own life after the death of Iris. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that sometimes I became a little sleepy reading the details. It was as if I was sitting across the table from Bayley, listening to the monologue of a grieving and grateful man filling the hours with his thoughts, those hours that would have been spent talking with Iris Murdoch or working, uninterrupted, on his scholarship. Yet, I wouldn't have edited out anything.
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Summary: "Elegy for Iris" is a must
Review: While reading this book I've marked certain passages in wich Bailey writes about their bond of love. Warmly written, clever and never over-sentimental. A wonderful book!
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Summary: "But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest"
Review: `Iris: a Memoir of Iris Murdoch' `Iris' is a fond, touching, introspective memoir of Dame Iris Murdoch written by John Bayley, her husband of forty-odd years. Professor Bayley recalls the first moment he saw Ms Murdoch and how after meeting her, their relationship progressed awkwardly to marriage. Thereafter he describes their life together as a comfortable solitude à deux. After Dame Murdoch developed Alzheimer's disease, Bayley refused to accept the idea once presented to him that to live with someone suffering with Alzheimer's was rather "like being chained to a corpse, albeit a much loved corpse". He conveys his conviction that the unique individuality of his spouse was not lost to the common symptoms of Alzheimer's; though she was no longer aware of her considerable achievements Bayley still regarded her as the highly accomplished person he had always respected and revered. (Dame Iris Murdoch [1919-1999] wrote twenty-seven novels, won the Whitbread Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize six times before finally winning it for `The Sea, The Sea'. In 1976 she was awarded the CBE [Commander of the British Empire], then in 1987 she was knighted and became a Dame of the British Empire [DBE]. Furthermore she wrote books on philosophy and received honorary doctorates from both Oxford [1987] and Cambridge [1993]). Throughout the memoir, Bayley describes caring for his ailing wife with such extreme patience and tenderness that he seems almost too good to be true until he admits to "losing it" and punching her in a moment of rage and frustration. Nevertheless, Bayley seemed to regard his own life as enriched by his marriage to Iris Murdoch. Indeed, that he adored and esteemed her comes shining through. This memoir is both a tribute and a love letter-well worth reading.
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