A Study Guide for Alison Lurie's "Foreign Affairs"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Alison Lurie's "Foreign Affairs," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823586

Book preview

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Foreign Affairs

Alison Lurie

1984

Introduction

Foreign Affairs (1984) is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by American author Alison Lurie. Set mostly in London, it is the story of two American professors of English from an Ivy League university who spend several months in the capital city of England. Ostensibly, Vinnie Miner, an unmarried woman in her fifties who specializes in children's literature, and Fred Turner, a twenty-nine-year-old eighteenth-century specialist who has just separated from his wife, are in London to work on their academic research projects. However, during their stay, both are drawn into unexpected romantic relationships—Vinnie with an American tourist from Oklahoma and Fred with a glamorous English actress—that have very different consequences for each character. Lurie's witty comedy of manners plays with some of the cultural differences between England and America while spinning a tale that explores the illusions of love as well as the wisdom, joy, and sadness it may bring.

Despite Faulkner's roots in the South, he readily condemns many aspects of its history and heritage in Absalom, Absalom!. He reveals the unsavory side of southern morals and ethics, including slavery. The novel explores the relationship between modern humanity and the past, examining how past events affect modern decisions and to what extent modern people are responsible for the past.

Author Biography

Alison Lurie was born in Chicago on September 3, 1926, the older of two daughters born to Harry and Bernice (Stewart) Lurie. Her father was a teacher of social work and her mother a journalist. When Lurie was four, the family moved to New York City and soon after that to the rural suburb of White Plains in Westchester County.

From early in Lurie's childhood, her parents and teachers encouraged Lurie to believe that she was good at storytelling, but at first Lurie wanted to be a painter. It was not until she was in high school that she decided to try her hand at writing. After she graduated from a boarding school in Connecticut in 1943, she entered Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946 with a bachelor's degree in history and literature. In 1947, she worked as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press in New York City, and in the following year, she married Jonathan Peel Bishop, a graduate student in English at Harvard University.

During the period from 1953 to 1960, Lurie gave birth to three sons. She stayed at home to raise them while her husband pursued his career at Amherst College, Massachusetts; University of California in Los Angeles; and then Cornell University in 1961. Lurie thus moved house three times during this period. She did not like caring for small children and was restless and ambitious. She had had two short stories published in magazines in 1947 and had continued writing, but during the 1950s she had no success in getting her work, which included two novels, published.

This situation changed in 1962, when her first