Alison Lurie

3rd September 1926– 3rd December 2020

Alison Lurie, the author and academic, has died aged 94. She was in the ‘front rank of 20th-century American writers, though her exacting and satirical view of human nature was, if anything, more admired in Britain than in America’, according to the Telegraph obituarist. ‘Her restrained prose, talent for pricking pomposity and alertness for social nuance placed her in the tradition of English ironists from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Anthony Powell, whom she acknowledged as an inspiration and influence. But while earlier novelists had written in periods of relative social stability, Alison Lurie wrote about American society from the 1960s, a period of rapid social change and shifting moral values.’

Lurie was born in Chicago in 1926, moved to New York when she was four, later studying history and literature at Radcliffe College in Cambridge Massachusetts. In 1948, she married Jonathan Bishop, an academic; after spells at Harvard, Amherst and UCLA, they eventually settled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; they had three sons.

Her first novel, Love and Friendship, was published in 1962 and named after the story by Austen. As Sarah A Smith in the Guardian confirmed, ‘Its picture of chauvinistic faculty members and the claustrophobia of small-town academic life was an early indication of Lurie’s tendency to use facets of her own experience in her fiction.’ However, ‘she always denied that her books were autobiographical,’ said the Telegraph, ‘though she clearly drew on her own experiences of people, places and, as it turned out, of unhappiness in marriage.’

‘Perhaps her best-known book, which won the 1985 Pulitzer prize for fiction, was Foreign Affairs (1984),’ said the

Times. ‘It concerned a sabbatical trip to London of two American academics… who each become entangled in a torrid romance.’

Lurie was ‘praised by critics for her crystalline prose, her dry, delicious wit, and her microscopic powers of observation’, confirmed Margalit Fox in the New York Times.

Lurie divorced Bishop in 1984, and married the novelist and academic Edward Hower, who survives her, along with two sons.