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Alice James
Alice James (August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892) was an American diarist, and the younger sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher and psychologist William James. Her relationship with William was unusually close, and she seems to have been badly affected by his marriage. James suffered lifelong health problems that were generally dismissed as hysteria in the style of the day. She is best known for her published diaries.
Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, daughter of Henry James Sr. of Albany, New York, and Mary Robertson Walsh. James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would plague her until the end of her life at age 43. The youngest of five children, she lived with her parents until their deaths in 1882. She went to a Boston school called Miss Clapp’s, where she met Frances Rollins Morse, one of her life-long friends often cited in her published diary and correspondence.
James taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston-based correspondence school for women founded by Anna Eliot Ticknor. The three years she taught were "among the most illness-free she had." James never married, seeking affection from her brothers and female friends instead. After her father's death in late 1882, she inherited a share in the income from the family properties in Albany, and her brother Henry made over his own share to her. This allowed her to live independently without employment.
In the Victorian era, hysteria was an extremely common diagnosis for women. Almost any disease a woman had could fit the symptoms of hysteria because there was no set list of symptoms. In 1888, twenty years after James was "overwhelmed by violent turns of hysteria", she wrote in her diary that she was both suicidal and homicidal. She was struggling with the urge to kill her father, though this diary entry does not state the reason why she was patricidal. In 1866, James traveled to New York to receive "therapeutic exercise", and in 1884, she received electrical "massage". Hoping that a change of scenery would improve her health, she traveled to England with her companion Katharine Loring. She was ultimately diagnosed with neurasthenia, which kept her bedridden for much of her life.
As Alice was suffering from breast cancer, which she died from in London in 1892 at age 43, her brother William James wrote her a letter explaining how much he pitied her. He advised her to "look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years." He wanted her to save herself from suffering the torment of physical pain. "Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this?"[citation needed]
William also suggested that she might benefit from hypnotism and recommended the London physician, Charles Lloyd Tuckey. Concerned about her suggestibility to hypnotism, instead Tuckey taught Katharine Loring to hypnotically relax Alice, allowing her to sleep once more: "under ... the pawings of an amiable necromancer, I have regained all my native dignity."
James began to keep a diary in 1889. The diary was not published for many years after her death due to sharp comments on various persons whom she had mentioned by name. A poorly edited version of the diary was eventually released in 1934. Leon Edel edited a fuller edition in 1964.
Henry, one of Alice's brothers, read this work with deep alarm (because of its candid indiscretions about family and friends) but also with enormous admiration. He wrote in a letter to another of the James brothers, William, that he now understood what had caused their sister's debility. The diary, Henry said, displayed for him Alice's great "energy and personality of intellectual and moral being," but also, "puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime—that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' person—in the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc."
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Alice James
Alice James (August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892) was an American diarist, and the younger sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher and psychologist William James. Her relationship with William was unusually close, and she seems to have been badly affected by his marriage. James suffered lifelong health problems that were generally dismissed as hysteria in the style of the day. She is best known for her published diaries.
Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, daughter of Henry James Sr. of Albany, New York, and Mary Robertson Walsh. James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would plague her until the end of her life at age 43. The youngest of five children, she lived with her parents until their deaths in 1882. She went to a Boston school called Miss Clapp’s, where she met Frances Rollins Morse, one of her life-long friends often cited in her published diary and correspondence.
James taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston-based correspondence school for women founded by Anna Eliot Ticknor. The three years she taught were "among the most illness-free she had." James never married, seeking affection from her brothers and female friends instead. After her father's death in late 1882, she inherited a share in the income from the family properties in Albany, and her brother Henry made over his own share to her. This allowed her to live independently without employment.
In the Victorian era, hysteria was an extremely common diagnosis for women. Almost any disease a woman had could fit the symptoms of hysteria because there was no set list of symptoms. In 1888, twenty years after James was "overwhelmed by violent turns of hysteria", she wrote in her diary that she was both suicidal and homicidal. She was struggling with the urge to kill her father, though this diary entry does not state the reason why she was patricidal. In 1866, James traveled to New York to receive "therapeutic exercise", and in 1884, she received electrical "massage". Hoping that a change of scenery would improve her health, she traveled to England with her companion Katharine Loring. She was ultimately diagnosed with neurasthenia, which kept her bedridden for much of her life.
As Alice was suffering from breast cancer, which she died from in London in 1892 at age 43, her brother William James wrote her a letter explaining how much he pitied her. He advised her to "look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years." He wanted her to save herself from suffering the torment of physical pain. "Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this?"[citation needed]
William also suggested that she might benefit from hypnotism and recommended the London physician, Charles Lloyd Tuckey. Concerned about her suggestibility to hypnotism, instead Tuckey taught Katharine Loring to hypnotically relax Alice, allowing her to sleep once more: "under ... the pawings of an amiable necromancer, I have regained all my native dignity."
James began to keep a diary in 1889. The diary was not published for many years after her death due to sharp comments on various persons whom she had mentioned by name. A poorly edited version of the diary was eventually released in 1934. Leon Edel edited a fuller edition in 1964.
Henry, one of Alice's brothers, read this work with deep alarm (because of its candid indiscretions about family and friends) but also with enormous admiration. He wrote in a letter to another of the James brothers, William, that he now understood what had caused their sister's debility. The diary, Henry said, displayed for him Alice's great "energy and personality of intellectual and moral being," but also, "puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime—that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' person—in the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc."