Reflections on Alison Lurie, Author of Foreign Affairs
By Tyler Scott | On November 12, 2026 | Comments (0)
Often compared with Jane Austen, the late author Alison Lurie left a substantial body of work: eleven novels, eight nonfiction titles, and six children’s books. The non-fiction included books on fashion and architecture.
I recently reread two books by Lurie — Foreign Affairs and The Last Resort and was reminded what a stellar writer and storyteller she was.
In the course of her career, she won The Prix Femina Étranger in France; grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations; honorary doctorates from the University of Nottingham and Oxford; and the pinnacle — the Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Affairs in 1985. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Alison Stewart Lurie (1926–2020) was born in Chicago. Her father was a sociologist, and her mother was a journalist. She grew up in White Plains, New York and was a graduate of Radcliffe College. She married Jonathan Bishop, a fellow academic who taught literature at Amherst, UCLA, and Cornell. They settled in Ithaca and had three sons.
In the early years of her marriage, Lurie taught at Cornell University while writing and amassing rejections. Her husband encouraged her to quit writing and focus more on their family. Thankfully, she didn’t listen. Her first published book, VR Lang, Poems and Plays with a Memoir by Alison Lurie (1975) was about a friend. She and Bishop divorced, and she later remarried the writer Edward Hower, with whom she enjoyed many happy years together.
As her career as a respected writer and professor grew, she observed that fellow female academics faced much the same challenges as she had. Her obituary in The Guardian quoted her as saying, “It took me four novels to get a job teaching one course at the lowest possible level.”
For years, Lurie was a beloved professor at Cornell University where she taught literature, folklore, humor, and writing. As a writer, she understood a woman’s psyche well and wrote clearly about our complicated lives. She was a keen observer of human nature, and all of her characters are interesting. Lurie wrote what she knew, and many of her stories are set in small academic towns like Ithaca, where Cornell is located. She called the school “Corinth” in her novels.
Her fellow writer and good friend Ann Beattie once wrote in a beautiful essay for The American Scholar in 2023:
“Every time I reread Alison’s work, I’m amazed all over again at the breadth of her knowledge, and impressed by how smoothly, in her fiction, she presented dichotomies, conundrums, and absurdities, so that they came to take on a kind of grace.”
This is why Lurie’s satirical stories, always with sly humor and relatable characters, have been described as having an English style, even while describing American moments and emotions. Gore Vidal once called her “the Queen Herod of American fiction,” a description she disliked. She spent a lot of time in England at her apartment, where Foreign Affairs is set, and for a time garnered a more substantial reputation in England than she had in the U.S.
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Foreign Affairs (1984)
Foreign Affairs is obviously autobiographical. The main character is middle-aged Vinnie Miner, a college teacher who has published several books, and is spending six months on sabbatical in London to research about folk rhymes for schoolchildren. She is a bonafide Anglophile and is thrilled to be back with her old friends in a country she loves.
The same can’t be said for Fred Turner, another professor from Vinnie’s college who will also be on sabbatical in England. He’s newly separated, broke, lonely, and hates being in such a rainy city. Both Vinne and Fred embark on affairs with others during their stay. Author John Fowles once wrote that Foreign Affairs deserves to be on the same shelf as the books by Henry James and Edith Wharton.
A pair of quotes from this delightfully entertaining novel:
“In this culture, where energy and egotism are rewarded in the young and good-looking, plain aging women, are supposed to be self-effacing, uncomplaining – to take up as little space and breathe as little air as possible.”
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“Of course, some people say it is her own fault that she’s alone: that she is impossibly romantic, asks too much (or too little) of men, is unreasonably jealous, egotistical/a doormat; sexually insatiable/frigid; and so on – the usual things people say of any unmarried woman, as Vinnie well knows.”
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The Last Resort (1998)
Though Foreign Affairs is considered Lurie’s finest novel (and certainly her best known), another that invites a fresh look is The Last Resort. It’s set in Key West, another place where Lurie spent a great deal of time, and where became friends with writer Ann Beattie.
The Last Resort is the story of a young wife named Jenny who has taken good care of her older, famous writer husband, Wilkie Walker. She has been a devoted mother to their children and a good editor for his books. However, her husband is now deeply depressed and secretly planning his suicide.
As Jenny meets more locals, she develops crushes on a man and a woman. At the same time, Wilkie tries to decide whether to live or die, all the while fending off an overexcited young fan of his work. This is another novel in which Lurie’s flair for comedy and observation of human connections shines.
In conclusion
In September, 2026, events in New York City and London celebrated her centenary, with authors discussing her legacy and great talent. Though this was encouraging, more needs to be done to ensure that this fine writer’s works continue to be read and studied. Alison Lurie is a writer who deserves continued attention and shouldn’t be forgotten.
Alison Lurie passed away at age ninety-four in Ithaca on December 4, 2020. Find more information about her life and work at her official website.
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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers. In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.
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