Alice James - by Jean Strouse (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, c1980.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History

The only comprehensive biography of the astute observer and diarist Alice James, whose life and legacy were long overshadowed by her two famous brothers, William and Henry James.

Alice James is perhaps best known as the sister of Henry James, the novelist, and William James, "the father of American psychology." Few readers were familiar with Alice's own life--until Jean Strouse's Alice James.

This illuminating, insightful biography takes us into the hidden life of this extraordinary woman. Despite her struggles with a variety of psychological and physical disorders, and with the limited options facing nineteenth-century women, James was articulate, politically radical, witty, and highly intelligent. She found her voice in a diary she kept until her death from breast cancer in 1892. Strouse's enthralling portrait not only introduces a little-known figure from the American past but casts new light on the history of American women and on the other members of the country's most prominent intellectual family.

Review Quotes

"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 Family Romance and Morgan: American Financier. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Newsweek, Architectural Digest, and Slate. Strouse has been a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and served as 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 from 2003 to 2017. She lives in New York City.