"Dame (Jean) Iris Murdoch" by Gisèle Freund, 1959
“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”
This quote is from the prolific author, Iris Murdoch, who would have turned 90 today. She wrote 26 novels, amassed many literary honors, became a Dame of the British Empire. For 43 years, she was married to the critic and novelist, John Bayley, who was deeply in love with her, almost from his first sighting, when she bicycled by his window at Oxford in a frayed tweed skirt. Bayley’s 1999 memoir, Elegy for Iris [1], documents in grim and heroic detail, his caring for Murdoch as she struggled with Alzheimer’s, during the last years of her life.
I’ve been thinking about the quote all day, and it strikes me as particularly apropos of my recent post, Are We Too Picky? [2] I’m supposing that Murdoch who married Bayley in her mid-thirties, would answer with a resounding, no.