SOURCE: Rogers, Katharine M. “Alison Lurie: The Uses of Adultery.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 115-28. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

In the following essay, Rogers examines Lurie's dissection of traditional marital inequities and her presentation of sexual infidelity as a catalyst for newfound self-awareness and independence among the passive, self-sacrificing women characters of her novels.

By entitling her first novel Love and Friendship, Alison Lurie invited comparison with an author whom she resembles in her area of interest, in her disenchanted view of human nature, in her coolly ironic puncturing of pretension. Like Jane Austen, Lurie characteristically focuses on the development of a woman's identity, through increasing self-knowledge and decision-making, and portrays this through her character's relationships with men. But while Austen shows her heroines maturing as they move toward their proper choice in marriage, Lurie shows them...