John Bayley

Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj

Leo Tolstoy

A groundbreaking translation of Tolstoy's epic novel of love, destiny and self-destruction is now in a new Bickford-Smith designed clothbound edition with foil stamping, an introduction, explanatory notes and a foreword by a noted critic. Winner of the PEN Translation Prize. An Oprah Book Club selection. 35,000 first printing.

Anna Karenina

Ronald Wilks

Alexander Pushkin

Presents a collection of stories, including "The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin," "Roslavlev," and "Egyptian nights."

Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings

In this memoir, Bayley describes the life he shared with his wife, Iris Murdoch, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. He explains how he coped emotionally and practically with the illness that beset the woman he loved and cherished.

A Memoir of Iris Murdoch

Iris

The author describes life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her struggle with Alzheimer's disease

Elegy for Iris

Hein Groen

Herinneringen van de auteur aan zijn huwelijk met de Engelse schrijfster (1919-1999) die aan de ziekte van Alzheimer leed.

Elegie voor Iris

Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature John Bayley, Sir

Leo Carey

A survey of the range of the Oxford University professor's distinguished literary career features his treatments of classics, lesser-known works of merit, and modern writings, in a volume divided into such sections as "English Literature," "Russian Novels," and "American Poetry."

A Lifetime in Literature : Essays, 1962-2002

The Power of Delight

A. Bradley

A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of 'the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things.

Shakespearean Tragedy

The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, with Biographical Anecdotes of Royal and Distinguished Persons (etc.)

Since the death in 1998 of his wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, John Bayley has given much thought to adjusting to his new, single status. As the carer of a victim of Alzheiner's, his was in many ways a double-bereavement as Iris, in the sense of the person who John Bayley met and married, very slowly departed this world some years before her physical death. This book provides a meditation on his bereavement and loss written in John Bayley's sensitive and amusing style of reminiscence.

Widower's House

Leo Tolstoy's writing remains as lively, as fascinating, and as absorbing as ever and continues to have a profound influence on imaginative writing. This original and elegant study serves as an introduction to Tolstoy, concentrating on his 2 best novels.

With Memoirs of Royal and Distinguished Persons, Deduced from Records, State-papers, and Manuscripts, and from Other Original and Authentic Sources

The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London

Unity and Disharmony in Literature

The Uses of Division

"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.

Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.

Shakespeare and Tragedy

With Biographical Anecdotes of Royal and Distinguished Persons, Deduced from Records, State-papers, and Manuscripts, and from Other Original and Authentic Sources

If Oscar Wilde were alive and well and writing in the 1990s, The Red Hat, by renowned critic John Bayley, is precisely the kind of playful, coyly erotic work of fiction he would have written. Set in Holland and in Provence, the first part of this elegant literary jaunt follows a trio of young Vermeer aficionados as they set forth for the Hague to see a Vermeer exhibition. What begins as a simple journey turns quickly into a cheerfully tortuous race against time when the group unwittingly--and mistakenly--becomes enmeshed in an international terrorist ring. The second part of the novel is narrated by Roland, a young man who has read the first narrator's account of the fiascos in the Hague. Setting off incognito, refusing to believe the account true, Roland searches for the original narrator, whom he expects to find living a lonely existence in a world of make-believe. As he conducts his search and the two parts begin to play off one another, The Red Hat slips between reality and fantasy, exploring the complex metaphysics of personality and art. Told by two separate narrators (the first of whom has an obscured gender), The Red Hat continues to twist and confound the reader who thinks he or she knows what will happen next. As our expectations are repeatedly built up and subsequently uprooted, an exquisitely delicious tension gathers strength, until it, too, is overturned by new developments. Constantly turning voraciously upon itself, this delightful romp refuses to be pinned down. Indeed, in the deft hands of a skilled novelist like John Bayley, nothing is what it seems to be: a book that masquerades as a noir mystery turns out to be a Moliere-like comedy of errors; a woman who is kidnapped turns out to be the wrong victim; the horny elevator man who runs the lift in the charming pension becomes a insatiable lover who may in fact be a Mossad agent; and the narrator--whose identity is revealed in the second half--becomes a slave, cheerful in bondage, refusing to return to England. Nothing ever turns out as it was supposed to be, but all is well, we are reassured, in this dashing fictional debut by one of the senior men of letters.

John Bayley

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