Alice James: A Biography

Abstract

Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry's novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, William's groundbreaking philosophical psychological works, have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation's cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. As Jean Strouse's generous, probing, deeply imaginative biography shows, however, James was a fascinating exceptional figure in her own right. Tortured throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention from achieving the worldly success she so desired, nevertheless emerges from this remarkable book as a personality every bit as peculiar engaging as her two famous brothers. The moral philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction William as science, writes Strouse, Alice simply lived. With a psychological penetration high eloquence that are altogether Jamesian, Strouse traces the formation of a unique identity, from Alice's unconventional peripatetic childhood in continental Europe through her years of spinsterhood in the United Sates later England. It was there that she began to keep her celebrated diary, full of biting social observation unblinking self-analysis. consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, she wrote to William, with characteristic tartness, towards the end of her life, and though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.