SOURCE: Hughes, Kathryn. “Good Spirits.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 307 (17 June 1994): 38-9.

In the following review, Hughes offers praise for the first and last stories in Women and Ghosts but laments the mixed quality of the rest of the collection.

It is six years since Alison Lurie's last novel, The Truth about Lorin Jones. Since then she has been attending to her other life as professor of literature at Cornell. Women and Ghosts marks her welcome, though slight, return to fiction.

Here are nine short stories about women who are surprised, pestered but not exactly scared by a rag-tag collection of thoroughly modern ghosts. There is the dieting secretary pursued by fat people or the obnoxious middle-aged woman drowned in her swimming pool by the vengeful spirits of two former employees. Sparkiest is Celia Zimmern, who is obliged to go on hot dates chaperoned by the whiny shade...