Obituary: John Bayley: Literary critic who wrote frankly about life with the novelist Iris Murdoch, his first wife

• Published in: The Guardian (London)
• Main Author: Cunningham, Valentine
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 26.01.2015
• Subjects: Bayley, FJ; Bayley, John; Cecil, David; Kipling, Rudyard; Murdoch, Iris
• ISSN: 0261-3077

He married [Iris Murdoch], then a philosophy fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1956. Bayley was an English tutor at New College at the time. Her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, appeared the same year, setting her well on her way to being England's most distinguished postwar female novelist. This pair of donnish young authors cut a dash in Oxford - their image enhanced by her flashy green motor car. But it was to academic literary criticism that Bayley turned. His writing from then until after his retirement from the [Warton] chair in 1992 would build his reputation as a great theorist of fiction. When he at last entered New College that year, it was to read not history but English, under the tutelage of Lord David Cecil - who was well up Bayley's gentlemanly street. They became friends and, eventually, colleagues. Bayley's Oxford studies were even more successful than his school ones. In 1950 he was awarded a first, and also won the Chancellor's English essay prize and the coveted Newdigate prize for poetry. Bayley never finished anything so mundane as a thesis - much too Germanic, American or, worse, scientific for the Oxford humanities in that era. In 1951 he received a postgraduate scholarship to Magdalen College, was briefly associated with the new St Antony's College for graduate students, and in 1954 was elected English fellow at New College. By this time, Cecil had risen to be Goldsmith's professor of English at Oxford, and the poet (and one-time prisoner of war) John Buxton had arrived to replace him as tutor. With Bayley in support, they would make English studies at New College a formidable thing. The classes in the reading of poetry that Bayley offered for years with Cecil became legendary, as well as being an apt allegory of the old Oxford English school's combination of critical agility with the principle of employing gentlemen of letters wherever possible. He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and appointed CBE in 1999.