[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 of her dead fiancé, the dismal Dwayne Mudd.

Not all the ghosts are human. In “The Highboy” a piece of fancy furniture will do anything—including murdering its owner—to avoid being put into a museum. And then there's the lacklustre postgraduate who takes his devotion to Wordsworth so seriously that he turns into a Lakeside sheep.

The best stories are the first and the last. In “Ilse's House,” a young woman called Dinah Kieran is shocked to find the ghost of her fiancé's first wife slumped drunkenly in the kitchen. As Dinah begins to investigate Ilse's fate, she learns about the darker side of the divine Gregor Spiegelman. Once seemingly so full of elegant old-world class, Spiegelman gradually emerges as a cruel, controlling bully. Taking Ilse's example painfully to heart, Dinah musters sufficient pluck to dash for emotional safety.

Meanwhile, in “The Double Poet” a respected middle-aged poet discovers that a woman who is virtually her twin has been giving readings, signing books and even making love in her name. In a desperate climax, Karo McKay tries to scramble her way onto a stage occupied by the “Not-Karo” who is coolly reading from her latest book.

Both these stories set themselves firmly in the tradition of the gothic ghost story which interrogates the stability of female identity. “Ilse's House” plays against Jane Eyre, with Ilse Spiegelman's incoherent warnings to Dinah gaining extra resonance from Bertha Mason's terrible revelation to Jane. In the process Gregor reveals a past as mysterious and brutal as that of Edward Rochester.

In “The Double Poet,” the disintegration of Karo McKay remains ambiguously poised between the material and supernatural worlds. Is her sense of being pursued by a coarse, phoney poet simply a symptom of her disillusionment with her own work? Or is there indeed a woman out there who has nothing better to do than follow her around? By situating her story within such familiar genres, Lurie is able to suggest that Karo's döppelganger may be some disowned part of herself without needing to tug at the reader's sleeve. The result is a lightness of touch familiar from the best of Lurie's fiction.

In between “Ilse's House” and “The Double Poet,” however, the quality varies. At times the stories verge on the glib: the child who is run over trick-or-treating; the 40-year-old woman who conceives after seeing the goddess of Lakshmi during a desperate adoption trip to New Delhi. Some of these stories first appeared in glossy women's magazines and there is a sense of good behaviour about them that insistently reveals their origins.