ALICE JAMES: A Biography

by Jean Strouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 1980

A sensitive, scholarly, immaculately written life which does just about perfect justice to its tragic subject. This is the first full-length presentation of William and Henry James' little-known sister, and it may well be the last: apart from the excellence of Strouse's work, the story she has to tell is such a dreary, uneventful, gray-on-gray affair that few biographers will be tempted to emulate her. Alice James (1848-92) spent a good part of her pain-racked existence in bed, suffering from a host of inscrutable ""nervous"" diseases before dying from a very concrete case of breast cancer. A lonely, childless spinster, ""she was not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy."" Aside from some letters, the only thing of importance she left behind was her diary, which had to wait over 70 years before being properly edited and published by Leon Edel. But this fragmentary oeuvre reveals her as an extraordinarily perceptive observer--of herself and of the limited stretches of the world open to her view--with some of her brilliant brothers' literary gifts and more political awareness than either of them. She never fulfilled more than a fraction of her promise, and after a particularly severe breakdown in the ""hideous summer of ""78,"" knew she never would. Strouse argues plausibly that Alice's invalidism was a self-chosen ""escape route--a way out of having to choose between a safe boring life of devotion to others and a dangerous assertion of intellectual competence."" Strouse misplaces a few emphases: she's hard on William James, too ready to interpret his pity and admiration for Alice as condescension. And she might have given us a few more details about AJ's day-to-day life. But if Alice often sounds like a Henry James heroine, inhabiting an almost disembodied mental-moral-emotional world, it's because she was that sort of heroine, and Strouse's account of the extraordinary intimacy between Henry and Alice is one of the best things in her book. A subtle, insightful portrait of a woman whose ""tyrannical helplessness"" thwarted but never overcame her creative spirit.

Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION