The literary world was today mourning the death of Dame Iris Murdoch, one of Britain's finest novelists.

The writer and philosopher had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some years.

Her devoted husband Prof John Bayley, who cared for her in her declining years, was by her side at Vale House, Botley, Oxford, when she died at 4pm yesterday.

Dublin-born Dame Iris's works were intricate studies of the human condition which never bowed to literary fads.

The Sea, The Sea, won the 1978 Booker Prize, and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won a Whitbread Prize in 1974.

Dame Iris, 70, who lived in Charlbury Road, north Oxford, had been a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, since 1948, and taught philosophy.

In a newspaper interview in the 1980s she said: "I think Oxford is really the place I prefer to be, because one is constantly surrounded by clever and imaginative people - they are all on the doorstep."

Her published works started with philosophy in Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, in 1954, and ended in 1997 with Existentialists and Mystics. As well as more than 30 novels, she also wrote plays and poetry. Her husband Prof Bayley, who was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, recalled their life together and described his wife's illness in his book, A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, published last year and serialised in The Times.

The work offered a brutally honest account of how one of the world's greatest minds had been slowly paralysed. Speaking to the Oxford Mail last year, Prof Bayley said: "I thought it would be a nice thing to do to cheer myself up and to celebrate Iris. It came quite easily and I have enjoyed it."

Fellow novelist Prof Malcolm Bradbury said: "I think she belongs amongst the four or five great novelists of the second half of this century to come out of Britain.

"There have not been all that many, but she was a major figure alongside William Golding and Anthony Burgess. Of course, the remarkable thing is she did what she had to do over a very long span of books - 27 novels - it's amazing."

AS Byatt, who won the Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel, Possession, said: "I feel that something in my life, that was the most important thing in my literary life, has ended."

She told BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme: "She was not well for some years, but I think she was the most important novelist writing in my time to me.

"She was also a kind and good friend. She helped me through the death of my son."

Lord Bragg, the writer and presenter of the arts series the South Bank Show, said: "Iris Murdoch was one of the greatest novelists writing in English in the second half of the 20th Century.

"Her novels combined philosophy and romance with humour and sensuality, even eroticism. She was highly admired and reached a wide readership.

She will be much missed and her place in English literature is secured."

Stella Berkeley, deputy head at Badminton School in Bristol, which Dame Iris attended in the 1930s, said she always kept an interest in the school. She said: "She was a very quiet and self-effacing lady. She did not enjoy being guest of honour, she much more enjoyed being with the girls."

Story date: Tuesday 09 February

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.