John Bayley

Finished in March 1956, it was her last novel to date from before her marriage and was dedicated to John Bayley . IM accepted an out-of-court settlement from MGM after their film The Sandpiper...

IM married Oxford don and literary critic John Bayley , at Oxford register office, wearing a mackintosh over her blue silk dress.

In a letter to Philip Larkin , Pym remarked, Iris was much smaller than I imagined—I'd always thought of her as tall, but I seemed to tower above her (though only in height, of course)...

PL 's Oxford circle included the young, still unmarried John Bayley and Iris Murdoch .

With this final novel EB won the James Tait Black Prize.John Bayley wrote to her praising its astonishing modernity and intouchness.

Critic John Bayley found AB on top of her form in this novel, spinning a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen 's.

Arthur Koestler described this, before publication, as a cross between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh . When EJH told him she was having trouble finishing it, he said she had finished it, and written beyond...

Reviewers varied in their assessment of Mantel's achievement in this book. Though they generally agreed on her merits as a stylist, some felt her characters here to be hackneyed and her plot overambitious. For Mary Kaiser

She took four years to write this novel, working with a new agent, A. D. Peters . Having before this written fast and easily, she now reduced her speed to a crawl, with constant rewriting...

IM and John Bayley moved from their house in Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire back into Oxford itself: 68 Hamilton Road.

Conradi (whose edition embraces a youthful diary from August 1939, while IM was on the road with a student theatre group, and runs of letters to Frank Thompson and Philip Hicks ) writes that before...

IM visited China for three weeks (her longest separation from her husband for twenty years) and observed the terrible effects of the Cultural Revolution, a decade which closed after Mao died in September 1976.