IRIS MURDOCH’S working library, a collection of almost 1,000 books, is being sold by her husband four years after her death.

John Bayley said that it was a painful decision, but that he did not have enough room at his house in Oxford since he had remarried.

The British Library has expressed interest in acquiring the books for the nation. The subjects range from philosophy to psychology and religion to poetry. They are covered with Dame Iris’s densely scribbled observations. The Bodleian Library in Oxford, partly because of the author’s strong connections with the university, could be another contender.

As well as the books the collection includes items such as makeshift bookmarks of pressed flowers, bus tickets and scraps of handwritten notes. It was assembled over 60 years and will provide a wealth of new material for scholars and an insight into her thinking.

Dame Iris filled the margins, endpapers and paste-downs of hundreds of her books with thoughts in blue ink or ballpoint pen, prompted by passages that sparked her imagination. Some are neat and legible and extend over ten pages; others take longer to decipher: page references, abbreviations or notes in Greek or Latin.

In a 1960 copy of Talks on the Gita, by Acharya Vinoba Bhave, the disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and one of India’s best-known social reformers, she wrote: “Do not expect great men to be saintly — The ‘saintly’ does not exist. Look at any ‘saint’ closely . . . Reading the Bible daily.”

In R. G. Collingwood’s 1950 treatise on aesthetics, The Principles of Art, she posed the question: “Are there works of art which have nothing to do with emotion?” Professor Bayley said: “As a writer and novelist Iris Murdoch possessed an extraordinary and fertile imagination. Books fed it, of course. But unlike many other scholars, philosophers and novelists, she did not depend directly on what she read, or on what she had read. Her mind seemed to work independently of her precious library, but at the same time she depended for inspiration on the presence of her books.”

Professor Bayley is a former Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University whose moving memoir about his wife’s descent into Alzheimer’s inspired the award-winning film, Iris, starring Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.

Three years ago he married a long-standing friend, Therese Manus Honning- stada. The library had remained almost untouched until now in an upstairs study at the couple’s house in Oxford.

He is selling the collection, which has been valued tentatively at £150,000, through Rachel Lee Rare Books of Bristol at the Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia, West London, from June 5 to June 8.

Ms Lee said: “As soon as I started cataloguing it, I knew it had to be kept together. It shouldn’t be split up. For people who want to study the works of Murdoch in the future, this helps to piece things together. It’s like a jigsaw. This collection paints a vivid picture of a remarkable woman who was a key figure in English life and letters for a large part of the 20th century, not only as a novelist, but also as a significant and influential thinker.”

Peter Conradi, Dame Iris’s official biographer and friend of 20 years, called for the library to be saved for the nation: “She was a major novelist, a major philosopher and a kind of iconic figure,” he said.

In Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, Professor Bayley traced a love affair that began with their early days at Oxford when he fell for her after seeing her passing his window on her bicycle and ended with her long struggle against Alzheimer’s and her death in 1999.

Yesterday he recalled Dame Iris’s passion for authors such as Freud, Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, who are well- represented in the collection. “Their work had, to use an expressive phrase of Emily Brontë, gone through and through her and altered the colour of her mind,” he said. “The same is true of Heidegger, on whom she was working at the time that the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease began to declare themselves, and her fine mind began to lose its coherence and its capacity for consecutive thought.”

He said: “It was a very sad moment when, as the disease progressively invaded her brain, she felt like the hero of her last, and for me her most poignant, novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, that she ‘had come to a place where there is no road’. And then not even her library around her could help her to find it.”

The gradual atrophy of such a mind made her illness all the more shocking. As her health deteriorated, she described her condition as “being in a very, very bad quiet place, a dark place”.

Although Alzheimer’s was diagnosed in 1997, the books perhaps reflect Murdoch’s deteriorating health in that few of her notes appear in any volumes published after 1993.

One of the most poignant observations appears in a book of Russian language exercises: “To become oneself a work of art — what is the use of that? In the end — There is no end. Ends are lived through. Death is, as Wittgenstein told us, not.”

• Readers of The Times can obtain free tickets to the Antiquarian Book Fair by calling 020-7439 3118

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