Iris Murdoch

by Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

The sexual appetite of Dame Iris Murdoch, the outwardly serious and high-minded writer who died last year, could be laid bare in a graphic series of nearly 100 journals.

Friends and associates of Murdoch believe she kept notebooks of her affairs over a 50-year period with lovers including Elias Canetti, the British author who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1981 and who died in 1994, and Brigid Brophy, the novelist and critic.

Murdoch, one of the most acclaimed British novelists of the second half of last century, is also said to have had crushes on and relationships with several much younger men in her later years. She died in February last year after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Although her husband, John Bayley, the Oxford academic, has not commented on the diaries, he has told of how she was the sexual veteran and he the innocent when they met at Oxford in 1954.

In his book Iris: A Memoir, he conjured up a lasting image of Murdoch's love life shortly before their wedding. "She sat me down in her room and said she'd better tell me of the people of her past. Had I not heard all about them? It appeared I had not. Unknown figures arose before me like the procession of kings in Macbeth, seeming to regard me with grave curiosity as they passed by."

Elias Canetti, left, receiving his Nobel Prize

The affairs occurred both when Murdoch was single and through most of her 43-year marriage. They were prompted partly by her apparent frustration at the lack of a satisfying sex life with Bayley.

Sir Richard Eyre, the former director of the National Theatre, who is due to make a film early next year based on Bayley's book, said: "John was always very aware of what Iris was doing. But he turned a blind eye." Eyre, whose own mother died of Alzheimer's, believes Murdoch and Bayley had a very happy marriage. It was one, however, where sex was not the highest priority, at least not for him.

Both Murdoch - whose novels included The Sea, The Sea, winner of the Booker Prize in 1978 - and Bayley were known for their lack of concern about how they dressed, looked and lived. Their house in Oxford, where the journals were written and kept, was strewn with papers and books. Murdoch appeared to the public to have the same donnish character as her books. She was not conventionally beautiful.

Ed Victor, Murdoch's agent, said the idea that she kept journals was "a delicious thought, particularly when I envisage this bag lady, who used to come into my office, as this sexual hot-pot".

Bayley admitted on Radio 4 last year that "he had no sexual feelings at all until he was 27", and that his love for his wife was "in the mind, rather than physically erotic". He admitted he had not found Murdoch attractive, although he quickly added that he hoped nobody else would find her so.

By contrast, many others, both men and women, were clearly drawn to her intellect and fame. "She had lots of affairs," said the writer A N Wilson. "Iris was more lesbian, though she did have crushes on men, some of them young enough to have been her son."

Wilson, who has written books on religion as well as his much-praised biography of C S Lewis, author of the Tales of Narnia, planned a biography of Murdoch in the mid-1990s. The book was cancelled when she developed Alzheimer's. Her official biography will instead be written by Peter Conradi, an academic who became a close friend of Murdoch and Bayley in the 1990s.

In hot pursuit, Brigid Brophy, who wrote about sexual liberation, is said to have had an affair with Murdoch, although John Bayley, Murdoch's widower, rejects it in his memoir.

Bayley, who remarried the Norwegian-born Audi Villers, a family friend, earlier this year, was not able to comment on the sex diaries. It is understood "he tittered" when friends raised their existence with him.

Bayley won both friends and enemies with his memoir, published in 1998. While it was moving, it was criticised by others because his wife was still alive, even though by then her illness meant she would not have realised it was being written. Last year he published Iris and The Friends, which chronicled the last years of her life. The former professor of English at Oxford has recently said he intends to pen a third book, The Widower's House, a wry look at the topic of death.

Eyre's film, backed with American money, will star Dame Judi Dench as Murdoch. Bayley has not yet been cast, though there have been talks with Sir Michael Gambon. Another actress will play the young Murdoch. "Iris was clearly quite a goer," said Dench. "But we can't get anybody too sexy for the younger Iris."

Bayley wrote in his memoir that, when he first saw Murdoch riding past on a bicycle, he thought "what a nice-looking girl". He first talked to her at a party at St Anne's College, where he was the only male present. He refers to the "lesbian" tendencies among the dons at women's colleges.

He also says Brophy tried very hard to persuade Murdoch to go to bed with her "both before and after we were married". He believes she failed.