Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: ambivalent realism
- Chapter 1 Alice James and the portrait heroine
- Chapter 2 The actress and the orphan: Henry James's art of loss, 1882–1895
- Chapter 3 Teacups and love letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James
- Chapter 4 Realism and interior design: Edith Wharton and Henry James
- Epilogue: 1892
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Alice James and the portrait heroine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: ambivalent realism
- Chapter 1 Alice James and the portrait heroine
- Chapter 2 The actress and the orphan: Henry James's art of loss, 1882–1895
- Chapter 3 Teacups and love letters: Constance Fenimore Woolson and Henry James
- Chapter 4 Realism and interior design: Edith Wharton and Henry James
- Epilogue: 1892
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What is living in this deadness called life is the struggle of the creature in the grip of its inheritance and against the consequences of its acts; the mother powerless by her tears to wipe out the wrong brought about by her weakness and folly, the daughter to escape by revolt from the ignominy of her destiny … How in emancipating ourselves we forge our chains.
(Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, 21st June 1889, AJD 38)Alice James moved to live in England in 1885, three years after the deaths of her parents. Two of her three surviving brothers were living in the United States, and she had no particular friends waiting for her across the Atlantic – only her brother Henry, who was living the single but abundantly social life of a distinguished literary bachelor in London. As Alice describes it in her diary, ‘I crossed the water and suspended myself like an old woman of the sea round [Henry's] neck where to all appearances I shall remain for all time’ (25th March 1890, AJD 104). The diary ends two years later, with a note by Katharine Loring briefly detailing the circumstances of Alice's death – one day after Alice had dictated a correction to what would be her final entry.
Alice James was a career invalid who spent her adult life exhibiting classic manifestations of hysteria: fainting, prostration, depression, back pain, stomach pain, paralysis.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry James, Women and Realism , pp. 25 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007