Legendary Fictions Of The Iris

Iris's parents (a prominent family in their country) died suddenly, thanks to a neighboring enemy country. When Iris finishes school, she becomes obsessed with getting revenge for her parent's death.

"I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved for her incandescent novels. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley attempts to uncover the real Iris, whose mysterious world took on darker shades as she descended into Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and aging, and a celebration of a brilliant life and an undying love.

The Grimm brothers' fairy tales have long fascinated readers with their violence and frank sexuality. Three of Britain's most important novelists, Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A. S. Byatt, have shared this fascination. Their fiction explores the darker themes of fairy tales - bestiality, cannibalism, and incest - and finds within them reasons to be optimistic about our fractured modern world.