With remarkable tenderness, John Bayley recreates his passionate love affair with Iris Murdoch—world-renowned writer and philosopher, and his wife of forty-two years—and poignantly describes the dimming of her brilliance due to Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a story about the ephemeral beauty of youth and the sobering reality of what it means to grow old, but its ultimate power is that Bayley discovers great hope and joy in his celebration of Iris' life and their love. In its grasp of life's frailty and its portrayal of one of the great literary romances of this century, Elegy for Iris is a mesmerizing work of art that will be read for generations.

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.

With this volume, John Bayley completes his trilogy, looking back on the years in sickness and health which he and Iris spent together, and attempting to come to terms with her absence. As time goes by he finds himself beset with new and alarmingly unfamiliar problems: he suffers equally from the helplessness of being alone and the kindly harassment of well-wishers; discovering too that a widower's life can contain many moments of bizarre comedy.