BOOKS
309
ALICE JAMES
ALICE JAMES: A BIOGRAPHY. By Jean Strouse.
Houghton Mifflin
Company. $1 5.00.
Virginia Woolf asked us to imagine the fate of Shake–
speare's sister- but there was no need. Her father's friend, Henry
James, had actually had a sister whose pathetic history could have
served the author of
A Room
if
One's Own
to illustrate the outcome of
female talent. But it was a less melodramatic case than Woolf's
hypothetical one . Alice James never ventured into the world that
might have scorned or destroyed her; she simply directed all her
energies of mind and spirit, these having no other outlet, back upon
her own personality. She had become a neurotic invalid. And when
death finally arrived without her having reached for it, she made it,
by her studied welcome, as much her act of choice as if she had
committed suicide, like the suppositious Stratford girl.
When she was dying, Alice said to her other distinguished
brother, William, "Pray don't think of me simply as a creature who
might have been something else, had neurotic science been born."
Psychiatric medicine might have been able, in fact, to assist her. But
she was probably correct in believing that it would have left her
essentially the same - a being who had been born with abilities like
those of her brilliant siblings, but who hfld been unable to develop or
employ them as they did, and who had chosen another form of
expression, her illness. Perhaps her "failure" was not inevitable. Even
in her time, women of her class and intelligence could sometimes
evolve into something more positive than neurotic protest. She had
enough literary gift to have become a successful writer; her sense of
social issues should have made her a worker in one of the bustling
reform movements of the time, particularly the movement for
enlarged opportunities and rights for women. She herself probably
did not identify her personal fate with the fact that she was a woman.
After all, if William and Henry were daunting examples of masculine
achievement, she had also her younger brothers, Robertson and
Wilkinson, to remind her that men could flounder and destroy
themselves . But hers was, nevertheless, a peculiarly female failure.
She was cleverer and possessed a stronger will than these other James
men, and it is hard to imagine that a masculine "creature" with such
force would not have exerted it upon the outer world.
