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.

Life 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 due to breast cancer. 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.

Era of hysteria Alice James (reclining) and Katharine Loring, taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890 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.

Breast cancer and treatment As Alice was suffering from breast cancer, 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?"

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."

Relationship with William Howard Feinstein, in Becoming William James (1984), wrote that Alice and her brother William had a close relationship that has been argued to consist of eroticism. William would write "mock sonnets" to Alice and read them to her in front of their family. One such sonnet has William declaring his desire to marry Alice, "I swore to ask thy hand, my love." The sonnet goes on to describe Alice rejecting him, "So very proud, but yet so fair/The look you on me threw/You told me I must never dare/To hope for love from you." William concludes the sonnet by saying that he will commit suicide because Alice will not marry him.