Adapted from the memoirs of literary critic John Bayley, the film recounts his courtship of and long marriage to British novelist Iris Murdoch. The scenario tacks back and forth from the young Iris--ready to seduce one and all with her coy command of words and sex appeal--to the elder Iris--slowly giving way to the cruel erasure of Alzheimer's.

"Iris Murdoch's life - like her books - was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, 'it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters, ' and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself 'must not...

Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and of aging and a clebration of a brilliant life and an undying love. So John Bayley descibes his life with his wife, Iris Mudoch who has Alzheimer's.