A short life of the author
Andrea Lee (born 1953 in Philadelphia) is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist whose work explores the lives of privileged, cosmopolitan Black American women navigating race, class, and cultural identity across continents — from Moscow to Milan, from Philadelphia to Madagascar. Her memoir Russian Journal (1981) was a National Book Award finalist, and her fiction — Sarah Phillips (1984), Interesting Women (2002), Lost Hearts in Italy (2006), and Red Island House (2021) — is characterised by an elegant, observational prose style and a willingness to write about Black experience outside the conventional frameworks of protest, suffering, and solidarity.
Life
Lee grew up in an affluent Black family in Philadelphia — her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a teacher. She attended Harvard and Radcliffe, and in the late 1970s spent a year in the Soviet Union as the wife of a graduate student, an experience that became the basis for Russian Journal. She has lived in Europe — primarily Italy — for much of her adult life and is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker.
Her expatriate life and her privileged background have made her an unusual figure in African American letters. She writes about race from the perspective of a woman who moves through the upper reaches of international society, and her fiction is more interested in the psychological subtleties of privilege and displacement than in the familiar narrative of racial struggle.
Russian Journal (1981)
Lee’s first book is a memoir of her year in Moscow and Leningrad in the late 1970s, during the Brezhnev era. The book offers a sharp-eyed, intimate portrait of Soviet daily life — the cramped apartments, the long queues, the informal economy, the relationships between foreign students and Soviet citizens — observed by a young Black American woman who is doubly a curiosity in Soviet society. The book was a National Book Award finalist and established Lee’s reputation as a writer of intelligence and cultural sensitivity.
Sarah Phillips (1984)
Lee’s debut novel (or linked story collection — the form is ambiguous) follows Sarah Phillips, a young Black woman from an affluent Philadelphia family, through her childhood, her years at Harvard, and her postgraduate wanderings in Europe. The book was controversial: Black critics, including the novelist David Bradley, criticised it for its lack of engagement with the broader Black community and its focus on the relatively trivial problems of a privileged protagonist. Lee’s defenders argued that this criticism reflected a prescriptive assumption about what Black fiction should be — that it must always address collective struggle rather than individual consciousness.
Interesting Women (2002) and Lost Hearts in Italy (2006)
Interesting Women — a short story collection published in The New Yorker before being collected — follows cosmopolitan women (Black and white, American and European) through love affairs, marriages, and encounters across cultures. The stories are coolly observed and precisely written, with an attention to the social textures of international life — the dinner parties, the beach houses, the complicated marriages — that recalls the fiction of Anita Brookner or Diane Johnson.
Lost Hearts in Italy is a novel about a Black American woman’s marriage to an Italian man and their lives in Turin and Rome. It explores the particular textures of race in Europe — where American racial categories do not apply but other forms of exclusion and exoticisation operate.
Red Island House (2021)
Lee’s most acclaimed novel is set in Madagascar, where an American woman and her Italian husband build a vacation house. The novel — structured as linked stories spanning decades — explores colonialism, race, wealth, and the uneasy position of a Black American woman who is simultaneously an outsider in Malagasy society and a beneficiary of the economic structures that exploit it. The book was widely praised for its moral complexity and its refusal of easy answers.
Critical Standing
Lee occupies an unusual position in American letters: a Black writer who does not write the kind of fiction that the literary establishment expects Black writers to produce. Her work is elegant, cosmopolitan, and psychologically precise, and it challenges the assumption that African American literature must be primarily concerned with racial oppression or communal solidarity.
Collecting Lee
Russian Journal (1981, Random House) in first edition brings $20–$60. Sarah Phillips (1984) brings $15–$40. Red Island House (2021) brings $10–$20.