I have always admired the qualities that made Iris Murdoch a great novelist: her technical skill, richness of imagination, philosophical ideas, and moral vision. In March 1978 I met Iris and her husband, John Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford, when they were invited to teach at the University of Denver. They each gave a public lecture—Iris on “Art Imitates Nature,” John on “Hardy’s Poetry”—and jointly led a two-week seminar on “Truth and Falsehood in Fiction.” When my wife and I drove in to attend the seminar from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where we were both teaching, we were surprised to find only three other participants. We wondered if the locals were too intimidated to attend a class taught by what journalists had called “the most intelligent couple in the world.”

The dimly-lit seminar room gave me my first glimpse of them. John, like Professor Calculus in the Tintin ...

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