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John Bayley (writer)

British literary critic and writer (1925–2015)

Summary

British literary critic and writer (1925–2015)

Field	Value
honorific_prefix	Professor
name	John Bayley
honorific_suffix
image
imagesize	150px
birth_name	John Oliver Bayley
birth_place	Lahore, Punjab, British India
birth_date
death_date
death_place	Lanzarote, Canary Islands
occupation	Writer, literary critic
spouse	{{plainlist
* {{marriage	Iris Murdoch	1956	1999	end	died}}

John Oliver Bayley (27 March 1925 – 12 January 2015) was a British academic, literary critic and writer. He was the Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1974 to 1992. His first marriage was to the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.

Bayley was "acclaimed for his dissections of Goethe and Pushkin as well as of Jane Austen". The "master of all he surveys", he "is the reviewer’s reviewer", excelling where "deep knowledge and logical examination come together"; his criticism “consists of attractively original examinations of subjects", "especially those devoted to poetry and to Russian and central European literature". Sir Frank Kermode, who held the position of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge, reviewed Bayley’s The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature (Bayley's literary essays from 1962 to 2002) with the title of “The King of Crit.”

Biography and career

Bayley was born in Lahore, British India and educated at Eton, where he studied under G.W. Lyttelton, who also taught Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly. After leaving Eton, he read for a degree at New College, Oxford, where he subsequently taught for almost fifty years. From 1974 to 1992, he was Warton Professor of English and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College.

Bayley enlisted in the British Army during World War II, serving in the Grenadier Guards where he wound up in postwar Germany. Over the decades, he reviewed often in The New York Review of Books. The choice of these essays and his scholarly articles from 1962 to 2002 were selected by the literary editor of The New Yorker, Leo Carey, and published as The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature. Bayley was also a novelist.

From 1956 until her death in 1999, he was married to the philosopher and novelist Dame Iris Murdoch who said "that her husband was perhaps 'the greatest critic since Coleridge'."

He thought that sex was "inescapably ridiculous". In spite of, or because of, his feelings, his wife had multiple affairs with both men and women, which he occasionally witnessed for himself.{{Cite news | access-date = 2015-02-15

John Bayley died on 12January 2015.

Portrayal in the film ''Iris''

Jim Broadbent won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as John Bayley in the 2001 film Iris. Hugh Bonneville portrayed the younger John Bayley in this film. For portraying Bayley, Broadbent also won the Golden Globe.

Bibliography

Novels

In Another Country (1986)
Alice (1994)
The Queer Captain (1995)
George's Lair (1996)
The Red Hat (1997)

Other works

The Romantic Survival (1953)
The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (1960)
Keats and Reality (1969)
Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (1971)
The Uses of Division (1976)
An Essay on Hardy (1978)
Shakespeare and Tragedy (1981)
Selected Essays (1984)
The Order of Battle at Trafalgar (1987)
The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen (1988)
Tolstoy and the Novel (1988)
Housman's Poems (1992)
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)
Elegy for Iris: A Memoir (1999)
Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories (1999)
Widower's House (2001)
Hand Luggage: A Personal Anthology (2001)
The Power of Delight (2005)

References

Leimbach, Dulcie. (2015-01-21). "John Bayley, Oxford Don Who Wrote of His Wife, Iris Murdoch, Dies at 89". The New York Times.
(16 April 2005). "Master Surveyor Of Many Territories".
Woo, Elaine. (2015-01-24). "John Bayley, half of a famed and devoted literary couple, dies at 89".
Kermode, Frank. (2005-03-24). "The King of Crit". The New York Review of Books.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20220602195023/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/arts/john-bayley-oxford-don-who-wrote-of-his-wife-iris-murdoch-dies-at-89.html John Bayley, Oxford Don Who Wrote of His Wife, Iris Murdoch, Dies at 89] ''[[The New York Times]]'' via [[Internet Archive]]. Retrieved December 30, 2023.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20220810071802/https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/john-bayley-who-stirred-controvery-with-his-intimate-memoir-of-his-wife-dies-at-89/2015/01/21/91e29c8e-a19c-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html John Bayley, who stirred controversy with his intimate memoir of his wife, dies at 89] ''[[The Washington Post]]'' via [[Internet Archive]]. Retrieved December 30, 2023.
Adams, Tim. (2001-03-18). "Interview: John Bayley". The Observer.
(21 January 2015). "John Bayley, husband of Iris Murdoch, dies aged 89". [[The Daily Telegraph]].
(21 January 2015). "John Bayley, scholar - obituary". The Daily Telegraph.
"Iris".
Andreas Dorschel, 'Kuschelecke Liebe. 'Das Haus des Witwers': John Bayley erinnert sich kaum an Iris', in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 115 (21 May 2002), p. 20.

Wikipedia Source

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1925-births 2015-deaths 20th-century-british-biographers 20th-century-english-male-writers 20th-century-english-novelists alumni-of-new-college,-oxford british-army-personnel-of-world-war-ii british-people-in-british-india commanders-of-the-order-of-the-british-empire english-biographers english-literary-critics english-male-non-fiction-writers english-male-novelists fellows-of-st-catherine's-college,-oxford fellows-of-the-british-academy fellows-of-the-royal-society-of-literature grenadier-guards-soldiers british-male-biographers people-educated-at-eton-college writers-from-lahore military-personnel-from-lahore

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