Alice James

(Paperback, Main)

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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. As Jean Strouse's generous, probing, and deeply imaginative biography shows, however, Alice James was a fascinating and 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, Alice nevertheless emerges from this remarkable book as a personality every bit as peculiar and engaging 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." With a psychological penetration and 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 and later England. It was there that she began to keep her celebrated diary, full of biting social observation and unblinking self-analysis. "I 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."

Reviews

A portrait of a brilliant mind placed under the greatest pressure, of a family that was expert at doing damage to its members, and of a social and intellectual world in which William and Henry James were able to thrive while their sister moved wilfully or bravely into the shadows. New Statesman

Author Bio

Jean Strouse is the author of Alice James, A Biography and Morgan, American Financier. A Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, she lives in New York City. Colm Toibin is the author of five novels, including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, and The Heather Blazing. The Master, a novel based on the life of Henry James, was published in 2004 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Among his nonfiction works are Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time. In 2004, his first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was produced in Dublin. His most recent novel, The Master, which is based on the life of Henry James, won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year Award in 2005 and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. He lives in Dublin.