Bill and Hank's Sister

BY MOST OBJECTIVE STANDARDS, the life of Alice James was singularly uneventful. The youngest child and the only girl in a family of gifted brothers, she never married, had no children, and produced no lasting body of work. Except for a brief period teaching a history correspondence course to under-educated American women, she spent most of her adult life keeping house for her father and suffering from nervous attacks. William, her eldest brother, became America's foremost psychologist and one of the leading philosophers of the nineteenth century; another, Henry, now ranks among the greatest novelists in the English language. Alice, lacking their confidence and powers of expression, became an invalid. Like John Marcher, a character in one of Henry's later stories, her hallmark was "precisely to have been the person in the world to whom nothing whatever was to happen."

Not surprisingly, critics of the James family have ignored Alice's meager accomplishments, concentrating instead upon the lives and works of her famous and successful brothers. In Alice James: A Biography, however, Jean Strouse offers compelling reasons for focusing attention on the youngest member of the family. Working largely from James family letters and Alice's unpublished diary, Strouse beautifully reconstructs the life of a woman frustrated by the expectations of her father and the examples of her over-achieving siblings. Cut off from many of her brothers' opportunities because of her sex and age, Alice remained far too inhibited by their accomplishments to develop capabilities of her own. Like many single women of her generation, she turned to invalidism instead.

Her choice, as Strouse persuasively argues, does not appear to have been an unconscious one. Her sometime-philosopher father, Henry senior, had little interest in the education of women; through much of Alice's life he remained blissfully unaware of her development. In an extraordinary letter which he wrote during a shopping spree in New York, he told her that he had picked up a "half-hundred" foreign photographs for William. "But they are too dear to permit me to buy any fancy ones for you," the letter continued, "...If I had only brought a little more money with me!" Later in her life, when she threatened to commit suicide during one of her nervous attacks, Henry senior blithely informed her "that so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased."

The elder James was not a pernicious father, and he certainly did not intend to drive Alice to self-destruction. But Strouse makes it abundantly clear that his remarks had a lasting effect. Denied the education and independence forced upon her older brothers, Alice had little choice but to stay home and hope for escape through marriage. By the time it became clear that proposals were not forth-coming, Alice had long since adopted a third Victorian alternative. Although she dabbled in community activities for the rest of her life, her main energies, from the time she was 20, centered around her "nerves."

ALICE SUFFERED her first breakdown at 19, and was bedridden with multiple ailments by the time she reached her forties. Her list of infirmities resembles an-encyclopedia of nervous disorders common to nineteenth-century women: at various points in her life, her condition was called neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complications, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis. Although it never became clear how many of her problems were physical, Alice's condition was at least, in part, a matter of choice. After feeling slighted and neglected throughout a healthy childhood and adolescence, she discovered, during her first breakdown, that her father refused to leave her bedside. For the rest of ther life, her most acute periods of sickness followed directly upon the heels of her greatest setbacks and frustrations.

Despite the obvious temptation, Strouse avoids ridiculing Alice and her impressive list of ailments. Her book portrays a woman of considerable intelligence and character, alternately confident of her abilities and scornful of her own conclusions. Alice's letters and diary, peppered with penetrating comments about the politics and social conditions of her time, reveal a mind that was often as perceptive as those of her famous brothers. With a healthier constitution and greater encouragement from her family, Strouse makes it clear that Alice's life might have been far more productive.

Yet Strouse refuses to make the error of presenting Alice as a martyr to frustrated Victorian womanhood. She frequently suggests parallels between Alice's problems and those of other nineteenth century women, and her book offers insight into the psychosomatic ilnesses common to Victorian spinsters. Nevertheless, she never presents Alice as merely a passive victim of masculine oppression. Alice herself, as Strouse argues, recognized her own responsibility for her failures, and one of the few emotions absent from her writings is indulgent self-pity. Toward the end of her life, looking back over her years of illness, she ruefully berated herself for her failure to be different.

Strouse occasionally indulges in unnecessarily long asides about the lives and works of Alice's brothers. She spends a good deal of space discussing William's ailments, which faintly resembled those of his sister, and she frequently looks for parallels between Alice and the characters in Henry's fiction. Her digressions are often interesting, and may be unavoidable since far more information survives about the brothers. Still, they seem needlessly detailed in a biography about their sister. One gets the faint impression on occasion that Strouse became slightly bored with Alice's nervous attacks, and would have preferred to continue her analysis of Henry's novels and stories.

But these moments are rare. For the most part, Strouse provides a fascinating and balanced portrait of a talented and frustrated woman. Her book is highly illuminating and eminently readable, in its own way as definitive a biography as Leon Edel's massive five-volume study of Henry. Alice James: A Biography is an enduring contribution to the growing collection of James family literature, and a moving and suggestive portrait of a woman of wasted potential.