Web posted on: Tuesday, February 09, 1999 2:38:16 PM

OXFORD, England (CNN) -- The accomplishments of Iris Murdoch are being remembered Tuesday, one day after the acclaimed author's death in an Oxford nursing home after a five-year battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Murdoch was 79 when she passed away. Her husband, John Bayley, was at her bedside. In a life dedicated to writing, Murdoch achieved some of the highest honors of her profession.

She won the Booker Prize in 1978 for "The Sea, The Sea", the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction in 1974 for "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine", and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for "The Black Prince".

She was also a Dame of the Order of the British Empire.

'The brilliant mind'

Murdoch's legacy might be remembered in her writing style. She wrote grand novels that often took on the nature of good and evil, and were stocked with middle-class characters who became embroiled in love affairs, incest, adultery, suicide, murder and madness. Murdoch believed she could take on intangible and debatable issues through the use of fiction, and many people believe she accomplished that.

Murdoch herself described her books as being a work of art with "a beginning, a middle, and an end."

Fellow British novelist Malcolm Bradbury calls her one of the century's major literary figures.

"She belongs amongst the four or five great novelists of the second half of this century to come out of Britain," he said. "I hope we won't just remember the sad end of the tale, but the brilliant mind that she used to have."

Born in Dublin

Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents, on June 15, 1919. After her family moved to London, she was educated in England at the Froebel Institute and at Badminton, a private school for girls.

Murdoch had been a compulsive writer since the age of nine. Her father spent time in the civil service, and her mother had trained as an opera singer. She attended Somerville College, studying the classics, ancient history and philosophy. In 1942, while the world was embroiled in war, she graduated with honors.

While at the university, she was an active communist, but became disillusioned and left the party. Out of college, she worked for the treasury before joining the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1944.

In 1948, the 29-year-old was elected to a teaching fellowship in philosophy at Oxford. She taught there for 15 years but gave up in 1963, finding it "a great strain." In 1953, she published a study of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the place of existentialism is Western thought.

'The voyage is over'

Murdoch's first novel, "Under the Net," wasn't published until 1954, when she was 35. During her writing career, she penned 27 novels, but also produced half a dozen works of philosophy, several plays, critical writing on literature, and other subjects.

Murdoch and Bayley fell in love when he was in his late 20s and she was in her early 30s; he says he first saw her as she passed his window on a bicycle. They were married on 1956, and the two were together for 43 years, living a quiet life together despite Murdoch's success.

Bayley, a critic and novelist, confirmed in February 1997 that his wife had Alzheimer's following rumors that she was suffering from writer's block.

In his recent memoir "Elegy for Iris," Bayley wrote: "She is not sailing into the dark: the voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's she seems to have arrived somewhere. So have I."

Murdoch had requested that there be no funeral or memorial service. Bayley is her only close survivor.

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