By Chris Jones BBC News Profiles Unit

More than four years after her death, the novelist and philosopher, Dame Iris Murdoch, still seems to generate more controversy than when she was alive. The latest concerns the decision by her husband, John Bayley, to sell her library of nearly 1,000 books.

John Bayley perhaps won't have been surprised at the implied criticism from several quarters that he is being disrespectful to the memory of his dead wife, acknowledged as a literary genius of the 20th Century.

The unease is heightened by the fact that many of the books she acquired in her colourful lifetime evoke memories of Iris herself, containing as they do margin notes and improvised bookmarks of leaves and bus tickets.

Bayley simply says that he doesn't have enough room at his house in Oxford since he remarried three years ago.

It's probable that he and his wife, Audhild Villers, are intent on some semblance of order he never knew with Dame Iris, even though she preached its virtues.

Dame Judi with her Bafta for Iris

He experienced similar mutterings in 1998 when he published a revealing memoir of his wife, on which the Oscar-winning film was based.

Dame Judi Dench's portrayal of her descent into Alzheimer's is the sum of many people's knowledge of the writer.

While it proved a moving experience for some, Dame Iris and Professor Bayley apparently lived in what was once described as "heroic squalor" long before her disease developed.

A beautiful mind

But probably the greatest complaint was that the film seemed to focus on her journey from "bonking to bonkers", as AN Wilson put it, saying little about the way Dame Iris thought and wrote.

Her novels analysed relationships

Confused by Alzheimer's, the mind that had produced 26 outstanding novels and six works of philosophy derived its greatest pleasure from the smiley sun face in The Teletubbies and had forgotten which of her books had won the Booker Prize - it was The Sea, The Sea.

But while the disease can manifest itself in childlike behaviour, Bayley perhaps found it less distressing than most: "She was like a very nice three-year-old. We'd always been rather childish together and we just carried on that way."

Dame Iris was "an enchanter", says her biographer, Peter Conradi. "She could fascinate, she could hold people."

Opposites attract

Bayley, later to become Warton Professor of English, was a junior academic at Oxford when he fell under her spell. She was a brilliant teacher of philosophy who had already attracted several proposals of marriage.

And as she cycled past his college window, Bayley thought "she looked rather agreeable and I had a fantasy that we would live together."

They married four years later in 1956, an unlikely union of a man for whom sex was still a mystery and a woman who had had many lovers.

The young Iris Murdoch was an inspirational tutor

"People have obsessions, fears and passions they don't admit to," Dame Iris once said. And it was certainly true of her.

In the early years of her marriage, she had an intense love affair with a fellow female tutor at St Anne's College and the liberated characters of her books made them particularly appealing to young people in the swinging sixties.

She regarded each novel as written before she put pen to paper, because she held the plot and structure in her head.

In her complex morality tales, she said her subjects were usually searching for "real love".

In love again

But while Dame Iris was apparently preoccupied with the notion of goodness, she was also "curious about the perversions of power", according to her friend, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

Throughout her many adulterous affairs, Bayley was her anchor, while Peter Conradi attests to her ability to make each of her friends feel "uniquely befriended".

John Bayley sees nothing wrong in selling his late wife's books

"She fell in love all the time," Bayley has said. "But she also fell into friendship all the time - the two were so much the same with her. She lived literally for love and for friendship. That's very rare in novelists, who are extremely egocentric."

Reading poetry in several languages, Dame Iris was fully aware of her immense intelligence, asserting that her novels were more valuable in analysing human relationships than any psychotherapy.

But she was not too superior to communicate with lesser mortals, insisting on answering all of her fan letters personally.

Perhaps this should be considered before her library is sold to the Bodleian in Oxford or the British Library, assuming they can raise the asking price of �150,000.

One opponent of that proposal, Adam Nicholson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, has a different idea. If people love the memory of Dame Iris, he says, they should be allowed to acquire one of her books, scribbled in or not, to keep at home.

To make them into a "museum resource" would be to "kill the spirit" of the fertile, unorthodox and "explosively dangerous" mind that animated her collection.