John Oliver Bayley, CBE, FBA, FRSL 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.” He is regarded as an eminent critic.
Biography & 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. From 1974 to 1992, Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford. In total, nearly, 50 years he taught at Oxford. Over the decades, he was a premiere literary critic, who reviewed only the most important writers for The New York Review of Books. Those essays in The New York Review of Books, and other scholarly and intellectual publications were selected by The New Yorker literary editor Leo Carey for Bayley’s book entitled The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature, 654 pages, essays 1962 - 2002. Only a handful of living writers and acknowledged masters like Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, and Alexander Pushkin are reviewed by Bayley in this opus of criticism. He was also a novelist and wrote literary criticism for newspapers. 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. In the mid-1990s, Murdoch fell ill with Alzheimer's disease, diagnosed in 1997. Bayley then wrote the book Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, which was made into the 2001 film Iris by Richard Eyre. In this film, Bayley was portrayed in his early years by Hugh Bonneville, and in his later years by Jim Broadbent. This film also stars Kate Winslet and Dame Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch. After Murdoch's death Bayley married Audi Villers, a family friend. He was appointed CBE in 1999. John Bayley died on 12January 2015.
Portrayal in the film ''Iris''
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.
