Novelist known for her dry wit and spare prose
Alison Lurie, who has died aged 94, was one of the great American novelists of the late 20th century, said The Daily Telegraph. Her dry wit, “restrained prose”, talent for puncturing pretension, and “alertness for social nuance” led to comparisons with Jane Austen, said The Daily Telegraph. Unlike Austen, however, she was not observing a relatively settled society, but the rapidly shifting social and sexual mores of 1960s America.
Alison Lurie was born in Chicago in 1926, to a Latvian-born father, who was a sociologist, and a Scottish mother, who was a journalist. She was brought up in White Plains, New York, and educated privately. As a child, she was skinny and pale, and as a result of a botched forceps delivery, she was deaf in one ear and suffered from atrophy in her facial muscles that, she said, turned her smile into a sneer. She recalled in 1982 that by the time she was eight or nine, she believed she would be an “ugly old maid, the card in the pack that everyone tried to get rid of”. Writing proved her consolation. “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world. I could move mountains; I could fly over Westchester at night in a winged clothes basket...” At Radcliffe College, she wrote a thesis on the relations between the sexes in Jacobean comedy; and on graduating in 1947, she got a job at the
Affairs,
Oxford University Press. The following year she married Jonathan Bishop, an academic whose career took them first to Harvard, then UCLA, and finally Cornell, in upstate New York. She continued to write, but they had had three children, and when her first two novels were rejected, she threw herself into domesticity “in the way I might have thrown a bone at a nasty dog I had to make friends with”.
She couldn’t focus purely on the domestic for long, however, and in 1962, having discovered a particular talent for writing about campus life, she found a publisher for her third book,
“The day on which Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband began much like other days,” reads its opening line. By then, she and her husband were starting to drift apart. In 1969, she joined the faculty at Cornell. There, she taught folklore, and wrote one of her best known books,
set at the fictional Corinth University. “Some critics found her characters brittle and unlikeable,” said The New York Times; but Lurie declared that she was fond of them, despite their flaws. In 1985, she won the Pulitzer Prize for
which is set in London. In 1976, she had been appointed the F.J. Whiton Professor of American Literature. On her retirement from Cornell in 2005, she was made professor emerita.
and Friendship.
Between the Tates,
Love
The War
Foreign