Alice James: A Biography

by Jean Strouse, Colm Tóibín (Foreword by)

Overview

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

A comprehensive biography of the visionary writer Alice James, long overshadowed by William and Henry James, her two famous brothers.

Alice James is perhaps best known as the sister of the novelist Henry James and of “the father of American psychology” William James. Few readers are familiar with Alice’s life beyond this—until now.

Jean Strouse’s illuminating and comprehensive biography Alice James dives headfirst into the hidden life of this captivating writer. Despite her struggles with a variety of psychological and psychiatric disorders, James persisted in her work until her death from breast cancer in 1892. A teacher, intellectual, and writer in her own regard, Alice James’s life and work were brilliant and enthralling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250364494
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher