Alice James (A Biography)

Winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History

The only comprehensive biography of the astute observer and diarist Alice James, whose life and legacy were long overshadowed by her two famous brothers, William and Henry James.

Alice James is perhaps best known as the sister of Henry James, the novelist, and William James, “the father of American psychology.” Few readers were familiar with Alice’s own life—until Jean Strouse’s Alice James.

This illuminating, insightful biography takes us into the hidden life of this extraordinary woman. Despite her struggles with a variety of psychological and physical disorders, and with the limited options facing nineteenth-century women, James was articulate, politically radical, witty, and highly intelligent. She found her voice in a diary she kept until her death from breast cancer in 1892. Strouse’s enthralling portrait not only introduces a little-known figure from the American past but casts new light on the history of American women and on the other members of the country’s most prominent intellectual family.