# Alice James > Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Alice_James > Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Alice_James.md > Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_James > Source revision: 1351122875 > License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) {{Short description|American writer (1848–1892)}} {{for|the publisher|Alice James Books}} {{Infobox person | name = | image = AliceJames.jpg | alt = | caption = Photograph of Alice James | birth_name = | birth_date = August 7, 1848 | birth_place = [New York City](/source/New_York_City), U.S. | death_date = {{Death date and age|1892|3|6|1848|8|7}} | death_place = [London](/source/London),[https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n14/mary-kay-wilmers/death-and-the-maiden Profile]. Accessed January 27, 2024. England | resting_place = Cambridge Cemetery, [Cambridge, Massachusetts](/source/Cambridge%2C_Massachusetts), U.S. | other_names = | occupation = Writer, diarist | years_active = | known_for = | notable_works = | education = | father = [Henry James Sr.](/source/Henry_James_Sr.) | mother = Mary Robertson Walsh | relatives = {{ublist|[William James](/source/William_James) (brother)|[Henry James](/source/Henry_James) (brother)}} }} '''Alice James''' (August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892) was an American [diarist](/source/List_of_diarists), and the younger sister of novelist [Henry James](/source/Henry_James) and philosopher and psychologist [William James](/source/William_James). Her relationship with William was unusually close, and she seems to have been badly affected by his marriage. James suffered lifelong health problems that were generally dismissed as [hysteria](/source/hysteria) in the style of the day. She is best known for her published diaries. ==Life== Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, daughter of [Henry James Sr.](/source/Henry_James_Sr.) of [Albany, New York](/source/Albany%2C_New_York), and Mary Robertson Walsh. James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would plague her until the end of her life at age 43. The youngest of five children, she lived with her parents until their deaths in 1882. She went to a Boston school called Miss Clapp’s, where she met [Frances Rollins Morse](/source/Frances_Rollins_Morse), one of her life-long friends often cited in her published diary and correspondence.Strouse, Jean (2011). ''Alice James: A Biography''. New York Review of Books. {{ISBN|978-1-59017-472-2}}. James taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the [Society to Encourage Studies at Home](/source/Society_to_Encourage_Studies_at_Home), a Boston-based correspondence school for women founded by [Anna Eliot Ticknor](/source/Anna_Eliot_Ticknor). The three years she taught were "among the most illness-free she had."{{Cite journal|last=Bergmann|first=Harriet F.|date=2001|title="The Silent University": The Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873-1897|journal=The New England Quarterly|volume=74|issue=3|pages=447–477|doi=10.2307/3185427|jstor=3185427}} James never married, seeking affection from her brothers and female friends instead.{{cite book|last=Feinstein|first=Howard|title=Becoming William James|url=https://archive.org/details/becomingwilliamj0000fein|url-access=registration|year=1984|publisher=Cornell University Press|location=London|isbn=978-0-8014-1617-0 }} After her father's death in late 1882, she inherited a share in the income from the family properties in Albany, and her brother Henry made over his own share to her. This allowed her to live independently without employment.{{cite book| title=Henry James Letters Vol. 3: 1883-1895| author=Leon Edel| publisher=Belknap Press of Harvard University| year=1980| page=4}}{{cite book| title=Henry James Letters Vol. 2: 1875-1883| author=Leon Edel| publisher=Belknap Press of Harvard University| year=1975| page=400}} ==Era of hysteria== [[File:Alice James (reclining) and Katharine Loring, taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890.jpg|thumb|Alice James (reclining) and [Katharine Loring](/source/Katharine_Peabody_Loring), taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890]] In the [Victorian era](/source/Victorian_era), [hysteria](/source/hysteria) was an extremely common diagnosis for women. Almost any disease a woman had could fit the symptoms of hysteria because there was no set list of symptoms. In 1888, twenty years after James was "overwhelmed by violent turns of hysteria", she wrote in her diary that she was both [suicidal](/source/suicide) and [homicidal](/source/homicide). She was struggling with the urge to kill her father, though this diary entry does not state the reason why she was [patricidal](/source/Patricide). In 1866, James traveled to New York to receive "therapeutic exercise", and in 1884, she received electrical "massage". Hoping that a change of scenery would improve her health, she traveled to England with her companion [Katharine Loring](/source/Katharine_Peabody_Loring). She was ultimately diagnosed with neurasthenia, which kept her bedridden for much of her life.Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography ==Breast Cancer and its Treatment== As Alice was suffering from [breast cancer](/source/breast_cancer), which she died from in London in 1892 at age 43, her brother [William James](/source/William_James) wrote her a letter explaining how much he pitied her. He advised her to "look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years." He wanted her to save herself from suffering the torment of physical pain. "Take all the [morphia](/source/morphia) (or other forms of [opium](/source/opium) if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this?"{{Citation needed|date=August 2023}} William also suggested that she might benefit from hypnotism and recommended the London physician, [Charles Lloyd Tuckey](/source/Charles_Lloyd_Tuckey).{{Cite book |last=James |first=Alice |title=The Death and Letters of Alice James |publisher=University of California Press |year=1981 |editor-last=Yeazell |editor-first=Ruth |location=Berkeley, CA}}{{rp|190}} Concerned about her suggestibility to hypnotism, instead Tuckey taught [Katharine Loring](/source/Katharine_Peabody_Loring) to hypnotically relax Alice, allowing her to sleep once more: "under ... the pawings of an amiable necromancer, I have regained all my native dignity."{{rp|192}} ==Diary== James began to keep a diary in 1889. The diary was not published for many years after her death due to sharp comments on various persons whom she had mentioned by name. A poorly edited version of the diary was eventually released in 1934. [Leon Edel](/source/Leon_Edel) edited a fuller edition in 1964.{{Cite book |last=James |first=Alice |title=The Diary of Alice James |publisher=Dodd, Mead |year=1964 |editor-last=Edel |editor-first=Leon |location=New York City, NY}} Henry, one of Alice's brothers, read this work with deep alarm (because of its candid indiscretions about family and friends) but also with enormous admiration. He wrote in a letter to another of the James brothers, William, that he now understood what had caused their sister's debility. The diary, Henry said, displayed for him Alice's great "energy and personality of intellectual and moral being," but also, "puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime{{--}}that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' person{{--}}in the usual world{{--}}almost impossible to her{{--}}so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of life{{--}}as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc."{{Cite book |last=Henry |first=James |title=The Letters of Henry James |publisher=Scribner |year=1920 |location=New York City, NY |page=215}} Alice, however, did not see her illness as a product of conflict between her character and her "usual world" surroundings. To her it was instead the outcome of a struggle between her "will" or "moral power" and her "body". "In looking back now," she wrote toward the end of her life, "I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 [when she was 19 and 20] when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ..."{{rp|149}} She eventually found, she continued, that she had to let loose of her body, giving up "muscular sanity" in order to preserve her mind: "So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing."{{rp|150}} ==Relationship with William== Howard Feinstein, in ''Becoming William James'' (1984), wrote that Alice and her brother William had a close relationship that has been argued to consist of [eroticism](/source/eroticism). William would write "mock sonnets" to Alice and read them to her in front of their family. One such [sonnet](/source/sonnet) has William declaring his desire to marry Alice, "I swore to ask thy hand, my love." The sonnet goes on to describe Alice rejecting him, "So very proud, but yet so fair/The look you on me threw/You told me I must never dare/To hope for love from you." William concludes the sonnet by saying that he will commit suicide because Alice will not marry him. There were also times where his letters to her were candidly erotic—he would describe her physical and personality characteristics and state how "desirable" and "lovable" they made her. ==Relationship with Katharine Peabody Loring== James's relationship with her companion [Katharine Peabody Loring](/source/Katharine_Peabody_Loring), with whom she lived for over a decade, may have been the inspiration for Henry James's 1886 novel ''[The Bostonians](/source/The_Bostonians)''. ==Sources== [Anna Robeson Brown Burr](/source/Anna_Robeson_Brown) edited and wrote an introduction to ''Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal'' (1934).James, Alice; introduction by Burr, Anna Robeson Brown, [https://books.google.com/books?id=p2IkAAAACAAJ ''Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal''] (Longwood Press 1934). [Jean Strouse](/source/Jean_Strouse) published what has become the standard life (''Alice James: A Biography'') in 1980. Strouse steered something of a middle course between Alice-as-icon and Alice-as-victim. [Ruth Yeazell](/source/Ruth_Yeazell) published James's correspondence in ''The Death and Letters of Alice James'' (1981). [Susan Sontag](/source/Susan_Sontag) wrote a play about James, ''Alice in Bed'' (1993), which seems to waver between sympathy and impatience with its subject. [Lynne Alexander](/source/Lynne_Alexander) wrote a sympathetic novel about Alice James, ''The Sister'' (2012).{{Cite book |last=Alexander |first=Lynne |title=The Sister |date=2012 |publisher=Sandstone |isbn=978-1-905207-80-0 |location=Dingwall |oclc=758984559}} In ''American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life,'' [Jennifer Lunden](/source/Jennifer_Lunden) used memoir, biography, and social criticism to correlate Alice's illness with her own, [myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome](/source/myalgic_encephalomyelitis%2Fchronic_fatigue_syndrome).{{cite web | first=Anna|last=Sims|title=Jennifer Lunden Review | website=The Linden Review | date=17 September 2023 | url=https://www.lindenreview.com/jennifer-lunden-review | access-date=16 March 2026}} ==References== {{reflist}} == Further reading == * {{cite book |editor1-last=Yeazell |editor1-first=Ruth Bernard |title=The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence |date=1997 |publisher=Exact Exchange |location=Boston |isbn=978-1-878972-20-0}} == External links == {{Wikiquote}} * [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/alice_bio.html Genius in the Family: Cameo Biography by Abby Wolf] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161029005134/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/americancollection/american/genius/alice_bio.html |date=2016-10-29 }} * [https://web.archive.org/web/20051108061455/http://home.bluecrab.org/~health/alice2.html Visiting the Emerson Girls by Frank Albrecht] * "[https://web.archive.org/web/20060426222555/http://www.amrep.org/past/alice/alice1.html Illness as Metaphor]" [Susan Sontag](/source/Susan_Sontag)'s only play: ''Alice in Bed'' {{Henry James|state=collapsed}} {{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:James, Alice}} Category:1848 births Category:1892 deaths Category:19th-century American diarists Category:American people of Scotch-Irish descent Category:Deaths from breast cancer in England Category:19th-century American women writers Category:American women diarists Alice --- Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Alice James](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_James) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_James?action=history)). 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