When William of Albany, as he came to be known, left County Cavan in 1789 in search of the American dream, he could never fathom that his grandsons would become America’s foremost novelist and philosopher respectively. But aside from Henry and William James, this extraordinary clan had in its midst an equal and perhaps a tad superior (as claimed by a majority of Jamesian scholars) talent in the person of Alice James, the younger sister who passed away 100 years ago in London, on March 6, 1882, at the age of 44. She would have also made grandpa proud.
Alice James was a very complex person who suffered from physical and mental ailments from a very tender age. Since the Jameses of her generation were spread throughout Europe and the States, Alice’s refined wit and uncanny talent to observe people’s behavior was on display in the many letters exchanged among them. As for her prose, brother Henry spoke of its “beauty, powers, and eloquence.”
Yet not all of her opus came from letters. At age 41, she started to keep a journal that shed some light on the character of her famous brothers, and on her own cultural preferences and ideology. Henry James, in a letter to his brother William after reading Alice’s journal, said that “what comes out in the [journal] is that she was really an Irishwoman; transplanted, transfigured… She felt the Home Rule question absolutely as only an Irishwoman would. It was a tremendous emotion with her.. perfectly explicable by atavism. What a pity she wasn’t born there — and had her health for it. She would have been a national glory!” Henry added that she would be
“a new claim to the family renown.”
Thus it was, coming from Henry – the Bloomsbury dandy and certified Anglophile — a very precise assessment of a passion that spilled out to other preferences. Jean Strause, Alice’s biographer, hints that William James exerted an influence over his younger sister bordering on excessiveness. Alice said that William, one of the fathers of the pragmatist current, would “lend charm to a treadmill.” On the other hand, she would also write down anything that Henry mentioned, causing some turmoil in their relationship. Though the majority of letters between Henry and Alice were destroyed, there is evidence that William did not come out unscathed by her strong assessments. Nonetheless, the sense of family was stronger than the eventual animosities.
Alice James’ journal and letters provide a unique blend of high quality literary and philosophical criticism with vintage personal stuff.
She spent most of her later years ailing from breast cancer, living with friend Katharine Loring, who physically wrote down some of the journal when Alice became too frail.
Still, it all began when Alice, unmarried and living a relatively uneventful life, decided to keep a journal with this opening salvo: “My circumstances allowing … but the ejaculation of reflections, a written monologue may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least, have it all my own way. …
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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