1999 It was announced on this day that John Bayley had given the brain of his late wife, Iris Murdoch, to OPTIMA (the Oxford Project To Investigate Memory and Ageing). The team’s principal interest is Alzheimer’s disease.
Murdoch, an Oxford philosopher and Booker Prize-winning novelist (for The Sea, The Sea in 1978) had requested that her body be donated to medical research.
She was diagnosed, at the age of 77, with Alzheimer’s two years before her death.
The pain that she, her husband, and friends suffered during her decline (and earlier, happier times) is recorded in John Bayley’s memoir, Iris, published in late 1998 (i.e. shortly before she died), and Elegy for Iris (1999). Bayley’s recollections were successfully filmed in 2001 with Kate Winslet as the younger Murdoch, and Judi Dench as the older, in Iris, directed by Richard Eyre.
Since her death on 8 February 1999, Murdoch’s brain had been preserved at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. It was removed to the OPTIMA laboratory at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Murdoch’s funerary arrangements are described by her biographer, Peter Conradi:
At her own request, no one attended her cremation; nor the scattering of her ashes ‘North of J8 flower-bed’, as the undertakers vouchsafed, at Oxford Crematorium; and no memorial service followed.
The 19th century, as an aspect of their fascination with phrenology, were fascinated by novelists’ brains. When Thackeray was a little boy, his favourite aunt was alarmed to discover that his uncle’s hat exactly fitted William’s five-year-old head. He was rushed to the doctors – water on the brain (hydrocephaly) was suspected. Aunt Ritchie was reassured to be told ‘that the child indeed had a large head: but there was a great deal in it’.
Thackeray’s head, as busts and portraits made during his life testify, does look unusually capacious. When he died prematurely, aged 52, Thackeray’s brain was extracted and declared to be extraordinarily heavy: ‘weighing no less than 58.5 oz’.
In point of literary-anatomical fact, Thackeray’s brain was not, for a novelist, outstandingly big. The Russian novelist Turgenev, for example, weighed in at a jumbo 70 oz. To the disgrace of French literature, Anatole France’s cranium supplied only 36 oz of grey matter.
The weight of Murdoch’s brain is unrecorded.