Alice
James : A Biography by Jean Strouse
Alice James was the sister of William
and Henry, the only daughter in a family of brilliant and not a
little eccentric men, and representative of the intellectually
repressed nineteenth-century woman whose grief finds an outlet in
neurotic illness. She kept a withering journal of her life, wrote
letters, and left behind a trail needing only modern signposts.
She was an integral part of a family firm of scholars and writers.
But she could never seize the opportunities that a few other women
of her age did. There was no air to breathe in the intoxicating
atmosphere where Henry was already writing spellbinding novels and
William was professing at Harvard and reinventing psychology and
philosophy. Her life, then, is a singular portrait embedded in a
family history that dazzled her age and still interests ours.
The
Death & Letters of Alice James : Selected Correspondence by
Alice James, Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Introduction)
Alice
James (1848-1892) was the sister of Henry and William James, as
literary as her more famous brothers, but - as was typical for a
Victorian woman - never formally educated and thus deprived of any
opportunity for a normal "career." In her introductory
biographical essay, Professor Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Yale
University argues that Alice James instead made a career of her
lifelong neurasthenic illness and anticipation of death. In this
selection of letters, many written from the invalid's bed, one
finds Alice James witty and lyrical, but always deeply morbid: an
artist of the deathbed, reminiscent of Kafka's fictional Hunger
Artist. Susan Sontag was inspired by this book to write her play,
"Alice in Bed." And critic Elaine Showalter has said
that The Death and Letters of Alice James is, "A book
everyone interested in women's history and literature will
want."
