SOURCE: Clark, Alex. “Spectres and Sibyls.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4759 (17 June 1994): 23.

In the following review, Clark evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of several stories within Women and Ghosts, asserting that Lurie's writing displays wit, irony, and a deft touch.

Alison Lurie has for many years continued to create quietly explosive comedies revolving around the foibles of upper-middle-class Americans, particularly academics or those in academic communities. Her writing transforms itself through its ability at once to satirize and sympathize, urging her readers towards careful interpretations of complex human behaviour. In this collection of nine ghost stories, her talent for subtlety and equivocation is to the fore, making its force felt in the sheer range and diversity of characters and in the inventiveness of the situations they find themselves in.

Women and Ghosts perhaps has most in common with Lurie's 1967 novel, Imaginary Friends, a story of mental disintegration based on...