num_pages: 367
description: Alice James was the sister of William and Henry, the only daughter in a family of brilliant and not a little eccentric men, and representative of the intellectually repressed nineteenth-century woman whose grief finds an outlet in neurotic illness. She kept a withering journal of her life, wrote letters, and left behind a trail needing only modern signposts. She was an integral part of a family firm of scholars and writers. But she could never seize the opportunities that a few other women of her age did. There was no air to breathe in the intoxicating atmosphere where Henry was already writing spellbinding novels and William was professing at Harvard and reinventing psychology and philosophy. Her life, then, is a singular portrait embedded in a family history that dazzled her age and still interests ours.
language: English
title: Alice James
titlecomplete: Alice James
genres: 20th Century, Biography, Classics, History, The United States Of America, Womens, American, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir
ratings_count: 162
awards: awardedAt: 347184000000
name: Bancroft Prize, awardedAt: 315561600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: General Nonfiction, awardedAt: 410256000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Autobiography/Biography (Paperback)
publisher: Harvard University Press