Lilian Renee Furst was born on 30 June 1931 in Vienna, the daughter of Desiderius Furst and Sarah Neufeld, dental surgeons. She and her family escaped Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 and she was educated at Manchester High School for Girls. She gained a BA in Modern Languages from the University of Manchester in 1952. She was a research student at Girton College from 1952-55, working on the German Kuenstlerroman in the early 20thC, and was awarded a PhD in 1957. Lilian Furst taught successively at the Queen's University of Belfast, the University of Manchester and the University of Oregon. She was Professor of Comparative Literature successively at the University of Texas at Dallas (from 1975) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (from 1986). She was a Visiting Professor at a number of universities in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. She published widely, not only on literary subjects, particularly in the areas of realism, romanticism and naturalism, but also on psychology and psychoanalysis and on the relationship between literature and medicine. She continued working until well into her seventies (see GCPP Furst 1/13). Lilian Furst died at her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on 11 September 2009.