Suzannah Lessard, an author and writer for The New Yorker who examined the ways in which people are marked by place — and the ways in which they, in turn, mark the landscape — and whose best-selling memoir, “The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family,” explored the dark history of Mr. White, the Gilded Age architect who was her great-grandfather, died on Jan. 29 in Manhattan. She was 81.

Ms. Lessard’s death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of endometrial cancer, Noel Brennan, her wife, said.

Ms. Lessard grew up in an extraordinary landscape, on a rambling compound that her family called “the Place” — much of it created by Mr. White — in St. James, a hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island, where her ancestors had settled in the 17th century.

The extended White clan was artistic and aristocratic, the family tree dappled with Astors and Smiths. Ms. Lessard, her five sisters and their parents lived in a 19th-century farmhouse known as the Red Cottage. It had sloping floors, patched plaster walls and a fraught atmosphere, largely created by her father, who required quiet for his work as a composer, as well as other, more brutal concessions from his daughters.

The centerpiece of the compound was Box Hill, a gabled confection designed by Mr. White, who was famous for the Beaux-Arts palaces that he and his firm, McKim, Mead & White, created for America’s newly minted merchant-royals in the late 19th century — and for the scandal of his death.

In 1906, while attending a musical performance on the roof of Madison Square Garden, one of the many Manhattan monuments of his design, he was fatally shot by Harry K. Thaw, a mentally unstable millionaire from Pittsburgh whose 21-year-old wife, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had been sexually assaulted by Mr. White when she was 16.