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Alice James: A Biography (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – Illustrated, November 1, 2011

by Jean Strouse (Author), Colm Toibin (Preface)

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The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry’s novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William’s groundbreaking philosophical and 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. But as Jean Strouse’s generous, probing, and deeply sympathetic biography shows, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tormented throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention and internal conflict from achieving the worldly success she desired, Alice was nonetheless a vivid, witty writer, an acute social observer, and as alert, inquiring, and engaging a person as her two famous brothers. “The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science,” writes Strouse, “Alice simply lived.”

Print length

392 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYRB Classics
Publication date

November 1, 2011
Dimensions

5.41 x 0.85 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1590174534
ISBN-13

978-1590174531
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“From an isolated, eventless existence, Jean Strouse extracts something that did not exist for centuries: a woman’s interior life.”
—Stacy Schiff, The Wall Street Journal

“Engrossing, disquieting … Stunning, this book is haunting.”
—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker

“Jean Strouse's biography of this infantilized, untimely, brilliant, radical, wasted, proud, hysterical woman does her complexity justice. Without didacticism or polemic, Strouse squarely confronts and explores the broad issues of medical and intellectual history that Alice James' life raises so provocatively. Her book is searching and scholarly, fascinating and sound. It is as good a history of Judith Shakespeare as we'll ever have, and its complex lessons, for both men and women, transcend intellectual history and touch life at its moral core.”—The Boston Globe

“Miss Strouse, in acquainting us with the younger sister of William and Henry James, has, as it were - and she is witty about Henry's ''ineluctable 'as it weres' - written a Jamesian novel, subtle, evasive, embroidered, splendid.... Miss Strouse, who weaves instead of hammering home her delicate points is as expert in literary criticism as she is in recreating family life, medicine, psychology and education in 19th-century America. —John Leonard, The New York Times

“This is an important book for those interested in women’s history, in literary biography and for those who want to gain insight into the inner workings of human beings.”—The Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan, American Financier as well as Alice James, which won the Bancroft Prize. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Newsweek, Architectural Digest, and Slate. She is currently the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Master (a novel based on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family. He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Illustrated edition (November 1, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 392 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590174534
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590174531
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.41 x 0.85 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,153,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,514 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #6,015 in Author Biographies
- #12,576 in Women's Biographies

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Jaylia

Fascinating portrait of an iconic family

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2011

This comprehensive book about the insightful but often thwarted Alice James, the lone daughter in the family that included novelist Henry James and psychologist and philosopher William James, shines a bright light on the post-Civil War/pre-suffrage lives of women born into educated New England households. The Civil War created a surplus of women in Massachusetts; there were almost 50,000 more women than men in 1870 and by 1880 that number had increased to 66,000. Naturally, many of these women were unable to marry, and scores of them, inspired by the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe, turned to writing popular novels. Though disparaged by the admirers of Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, literature by women had a large almost captive audience of disenfranchised females.

When her diaries were published after her death Alice was celebrated as a talented writer but she was not one of the new female novelists. Alice was never expected, encouraged or often even allowed to do much of anything at all. During this era there seemed to be an epidemic of women suffering "nervous disorders", and their number included Alice, because in spite of her excellent mind for much of her life she had no real work to do. Her father, Henry James Sr., was wild and unmanageable in his youth, rebelling against his strict religious father, and he was generally forward thinking as an adult, providing a rich environment for his children that helped nourish his oldest sons' abilities, but there was a dichotomy in his thinking because he could only be so progressive based on his upbringing and the age he lived in. He believed women were superior to men and meant to be admired and emulated, but because of that they were uninteresting, had no need of education or cultivation, and needed to be protected. Growing up in this situation Alice spent much of her life at war with herself, and her health suffered.

This is not a downer of a book, however, because Alice ultimately does find a place for herself in the world as it was, and it's fascinating to have an intimate glimpse of the lives of women in the late 1800's and the and early family years of Henry and William James. Alice James: A Biography also provides many opportunities for further reading if you are interested. I haven't been able to find a source for the diaries of Alice James, but the background information about William and Henry James inspired me to read or reread at their writing, and then there is also all those female novelists, whose work can often be downloaded as e-books at sites like Project Gutenberg.

23 people found this helpful

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Jan Overstreet

Excellent biography of a fascinating lady

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2001

It's interesting that Alice's disabling illness has always been considered as neurotic, perhaps even a sign of envy of her successful brothers. It's occurred to me that Alice may have been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, at that time an undiagnosed illness, as opposed to "brother envy". In any case, the book is beautifully written and is fascinating indeed.

17 people found this helpful

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pulling cheek swirl better shake up

very intellectual creative subjectivity before our time

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2012

The 2011 preface only adds 3 or 4 pages at the front of the book. I would like people to read in an attempt to change their outlook on today, so I consider this book in connections with a few other things that come to my attention in a century that could use some sense of direction.

I am a man of constant swallow. Food is best raw and fresh, but custom has created processed food to make life possible in civilizations that do not allow everyone enough resources to grow what they eat. Intellectual activity is most like processed food when creative subjectivity is strongest in those who are sensitive to the vile nature of consensus. Tradition won't always provide answers for people raised on a song like Casey Jones by the Grateful Dead:
Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead

Up around the bend,
you know it's the end.

From London, 2005, Cream Royal Albert Hall: Cream - Royal Albert Hall - London May 2-3-5-6 2005

Pressed Rat and Warthog were told to close up shop.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, the psychology of optimal experience.

Consciousness in conflict between being alone and being with others.

Jean Strouse, Alice James, a Biography.

Registering dramatic wars that raged through her body and mind.

Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other. Inscribing the Other (Texts and Contexts)

Even Wagner agrees with the rabble, so draw a line with distinctions that define my own world and theirs.

There was an outburst of creative subjectivity in the novels of Henry James that made his brother William James compete for an understanding of social behavior. The Henry James who was the father of William, Henry, and Alice took an active role in raising his children so they would not be the prisoners of the perceptions shaped in Europe or America. Henry James, Sr. was enthusiastic about the writings of Swedenborg, but his ideas sprang from his own creative subjectivity instead of being tied to doctrines that create traditional religious institutions, so space and time became key concepts for daredevil intellectuals antics like pulling up epistemic stakes excites modern Americans.

Talk soup was in a pressure cooker for Alice James. She was not raised at home or away at school. Being anywhere was an opportunity to live as her brother the novelist wrote:

we were never in a single case,
I think, for two generations,
guilty of a stroke of business. (p. 12).

Mentalities that recapitulate all the highs and lows while avoiding the kind of activity that others find necessary to maintain a daily routine feel a great need to be the cause of something better. Alice James never figured out how much better she should be. Alice was treated with morphine, which was an "ineffable blessing" (p. 308) in September 1891 to kill the pain of cancer in Alice's breast, but that is close to giving away the ending. In 1894 her brother William read a copy of her diary and wrote to Henry:

It sank into me with strange
compunction and solemnity.
The diary produces a unique
and tragic impression of
personal power venting
itself on no opportunity.
And such really deep humor!
. . . your memory will be
embalmed in a new way
by her references to your
person (p. 319).

These people were so famous that the diary was published and widely read. The father, Henry James, Sr., "was devoted to the life of the mind" (p. 12) and even inherited property yielding an annual income of $10,000 when his father William James died in 1832. In 2012, the average Social Security benefit is not much higher than that, but I have always pictured the age of 65 as a time to pursue truth, intellect, and taste. On page 6, Henry James was born in Albany on June 2, 1811, a mere 21 years before the death of his father. One of his legs was cut off on May 6, 1828, after Henry's pants had been splashed with turpentine before he tried to stamp out a fire. At the age of 16, a rich kid playing daredevil games with paper balloons that rose in the air as a fire heated the air in the paper and dropped when the paper burned was a major turning point:

He came to the conclusion
that selfish pleasure incurred
punishment, and that suffering
brought love. And he passed
both those notions along to
his own children. (p. 9).

the characteristic strain in
all his adult writing is a
roaming, passionate energy. (p. 9).

William James became famous as an educator at Harvard University for being able to relate to the kind of life that American youth wanted to lead. The book Inscribing the Other (1991) by Sander L. Gilman describes everybody as creating fictive personalities for themselves and ascribing personalities to others as a primary way of adapting to life in the world. I have been describing a nation of shoppers driven by entertainment values as if tree snakes were rippling upward in their bong water. Outbursts of infinity beyond the horizon of existing mentalities opened up possibilities that are beyond the horizon of commercial interests trying to attract investment by people with big bucks hoping for stupendous returns on investments. Sometimes a string of amazing coincidences convinces some fools that a future has bright possibilities, but Alice James lived in a family that could confuse the future with failure. If you don't believe me, see the footnote on page xiv:

James's mistake did contain a certain
truth, however, for within the James
family there was, oddly enough, a
future in illness. But that is getting
ahead of the story.

2 people found this helpful

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C. Still

Impenetrable.

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2015

Verified Purchase

This was the most impenetrable book I have read in a long time, maybe forever. I noticed first of all that Alice James barely appear at all in the book until the first third. I am afraid that I couldn't finish it. Here's a summary. She was a girl, girls didn't get the privileges and attention that boys got. She was smart, maybe if she had been a boy, she would have gone far.

5 people found this helpful

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