Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer "who defied her parents' expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English," died April 30, the New York Times reported. She was 85.
Rachlin's debut novel, Foreigner, published just before the Iranian revolution of 1979, "depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil," the Times wrote. Her second novel, Married to a Stranger (1983), explored post-revolutionary Iran.
In a 1990 lecture, author V.S. Naipaul said that Foreigner, "in its subdued, unpolitical way, foreshadowed the hysteria that was to come" for Iran.
Her other works include two short story collections, Veils (1992) and A Way Home (2018), and three novels: The Heart's Desire (1995), Jumping Over Fire (2006) and Mirage (2024). Her last novel, Given Away, will be published next year.
In her memoir, Persian Girls (2006), Rachlin recalled that while attending college in Missouri, she discovered that even though she had escaped the "prison" of her home country, she felt utterly isolated in America.
While still in Iran, she wanted her father to send her to the U.S. to attend college, like her brothers, but he refused. But political tensions were escalating and both her feminist teacher and the bookseller who sometimes slipped her banned literature had disappeared. Her father relented and allowed her to apply to Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., on a full scholarship, "hoping his headstrong daughter would cause less trouble abroad--though not without stipulating that she return home after graduation to marry," the Times noted.
"Late at night I turned to my writing, my long-lasting friend," she wrote in her memoir. "Writing in English gave me a freedom I didn't feel writing in Farsi."
She majored in psychology and after graduating chose not to return to Iran, a decision that caused her father to not speak to her for 12 years. Rachlin moved to New York City, married and had a child, then eventually moved in the mid-1970s to Stanford, Calif., where, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she worked on Foreigner.
Iranian censors blocked the novel's publication in Farsi. Her literary agent, Cole Hildebrand, said he believes that none of her books were translated into Farsi.