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Editor’s note: Because of its length, this column by Bishop Robert Barron will be published in a two-part series.
One of the most impressive literary figures of the 20th century was the Irish writer Iris Murdoch. You may have heard of her surprising and thoughtful novels such as A Severed Head and The Good Apprentice; or perhaps you are conversant with her more abstract philosophical texts such as The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
She reached her greatest notoriety, posthumously, in the work of her husband John Bayley, who penned a moving memoir of his wife’s slow and emotionally wrenching descent into Alzheimer’s disease. To hear the story of one of the brightest women of her time gradually losing her mind is, to say the least, unnerving. But due to Bayley’s artful telling, the experience becomes, almost despite itself, uplifting as well.