Alice James
  • Published: 15 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590174531
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 392
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Alice James

A Biography

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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. 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.”
  • Published: 15 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590174531
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 392
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Praise for Alice James

  • "Engrossing, disquieting.... Stunning, this book is haunting." --The New Yorker
  • "Brilliant...Strouse has created a fascinating picture of 'woman's place' in a family of genius and throws a searching light on the price a woman sometimes pays when reared in such a hothouse." --Leon Edel
  • "A triumph of exact compassion of disciplined speculation, and of imaginative justice. Alice James lives in these pages." --Christopher Ricks, Sunday Times (London)
  • "In Jean Strouse's skillful hands the life of Alice James, which was one of extraordinary limits, and of barbarous suffering, touches us in ways we had not expected to be touched.... Strouse has managed, with a rare ability, to make us see and feel and care." --Nancy Mitford
  • "Strouse's distinguished biography has made Alice James a figure in her own right, as a diarist and proto-feminist..." --Washington Post Book World
  • "Searching, fascinating, sound...its complex lessons...transcend intellectual history and touch life at its moral core." --The Boston Globe
  • "In all the flood of feminist writing...Strouse's extraordinarily thorough biography of Alice James may stand as perhaps the most important... Strouse meticulously weaves us the tapestry of 19th-Century Boston..." --Los Angeles Times