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Alice James

Alice James

A Biography

by Jean Strouse, preface by Colm Tóibín

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$17.95
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Winner of The Bancroft Prize

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. But as Jean Strouse's generous, probing, and deeply sympathetic biography shows, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tormented throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention and internal conflict from achieving the worldly success she desired, Alice was nonetheless a vivid, witty writer, an acute social observer, and as alert, inquiring, and engaging a person 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."by Jean Strouse, preface by Colm Toibin

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590174531
Pages: 392
Publication Date:

Praise

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.
—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

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