Sarah Allis Thurber

Sarah Allis Thurber of Hollis, New Hampshire, died peacefully at her home, Linden Row Farm, on May 9. She was born Sarah Ramsay Streich in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on July 19, 1938. She was the daughter Phillip Alexander Streich and Jean Moore Streich. She married Edward Morison Allis of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1961. Mr. Allis died in 1968. She married George Freeman Thurber, Jr., of Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1975. Mr. Thurber died in 1983.

Sarah Thurber was educated at the Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and for the rest of her life she remained a Quaker in philosophy and private action. She received her A.B. in Zoology from Vassar College and went on to receive a Masters degree from Boston University in English literature. After attaining distinction on her comprehensive examinations for the doctorate, she chose instead of a dissertation to publish in 1975 her first novel Nightwind with Bobbs-Merrill.

After living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she moved to a horse farm in Hollis, New Hampshire. In addition to managing the free spirits and adventures of her two beloved boys, she rode, participated in hunts with the Concord Hunt, bred and showed horses as well as dogs. She was mad for animals and would cycle through the various names of her horses and dogs before finding those of her two sons – which on some days were simply “hey you.” She had a deep intellectual curiosity spanning many disciplines, genres and eras, and she traveled widely researching her writing. But she always returned home saying she had never found a place as beautiful as New Hampshire.

In a lifetime, two or maybe three people come along who engrave in memory phrases so distinctive they come back verbatim. Sarah Allis Thurber was someone whose words went directly from air to stone. She was adopted by books, her other Mother. She lived literature. She experienced herself as some mix of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Sappho’s Kleis. Writing under the name Sarah Ramsay, her voice was powerful, her ideas were unconventional, her style unique. Sarah lived poetry, her life was verse after verse. As a pure intellect, she was brilliant, ruthless, unbelievably widely read – with an astonishing erudition worn carelessly. At the time of her death, she was putting the final touches on the manuscript of her novel Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light.

Sarah is survived by her two precocious Shiba Inu’s Yoshi and Ema; her eldest son William Phelps Allis II, his wife Sara Wolf, their 2 young children, Lilyanna Wolf and Rowan Edward all of South Berwick, Maine, as well as her youngest son Ramsay Freeman Thurber of Hollis, New Hampshire.

SERVICES: The memorial service will take place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Nashua at 11 a.m., Friday, May 18, with The Reverend Alanna M. Van Antwerpen officiating, directly followed by interment at Edgewood Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the New Hampshire SPCA (http://www.nhspca.org/)

The DAVIS FUNERAL HOME, One Lock St., Nashua has been placed in charge of arrangements. An online guest book is available at www.davisfuneralhomenh.com, (603-883-3401) “ONE MEMORY LIGHTS ANOTHER.”