The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence (review)

The Death am) Letters of Alice James; Selected Correspondence. Edited, with a biographical essay, by Ruth Bernard YeazeM, Berkeley: UnIv. of CaI lfornla Press, 1981. 214 pp. $12.95. The Illnesses of the Jameses have long been of Interest to James scholars. Even so startling an enterprise as Leon Edel·s formidable five-volume biography of Henry, grounded as it Is In Freudian Insights that specify the neuroses at the core of James's being, may be seen as mere extension of more orthodox assessments of «hat ailed the James family. Alice James, an Invalid to a greater or lesser extent from the time she Mas sixteen, therefore earned the attention that has been bestowed upon her. Her very frai i existence has been a model of what a James could be driven to—and her case, unlike Robertson's or Garth Wilkinson's, Is Intelligently and more abundantly se If-documented. Thus, In 1934, Anna Robeson Burr, the first editor of Alice James's Journal, after cataloguing the tormenting visions, emotional breakdowns and chronic poor health of the family, all of which culminate and become allegorized in Alice's neurasthenia, felt the imperative to remark, "In this connection It Is not amiss to note certain psychological manifestations In this family, which must have played a large part In their inheritance and development," And Edel himself speculates, In the Introduction to his edition of the Diary (1964), on the connection between the physical and the psychological in Alice's case; he agrees with Henry's pronouncement that for Alice "Tragic health was, In a manner, the only solution ... of the practical problem of life." Ruth Yeazell's central contribution to the Increasing scholarship on Alice James, then, is not in her introduction to The Death and Letters of Al Ice James. For though Yeazell, a noted James scholar— author of the fascinating Language and Knowledge In the Late Novels of Henry James and the Associate Editor of Nineteenth-Century Fiction—rightly and sensitively points out that for Alice James "dying had become ... Iher! chief vocation," such an Insight is not original. What Yeazell has done for literary scholars, historians, and feminists Is to make available, by her own reckoning, one third of the extant letters of Alice Ji And remarkable letters they are, Anna Robeson Burr noted, "From the very first entry the difference between her Journal and her letters Is striking. The latter are dragged down into commonplaces by her state, while the former soars on wings of courage and humor, vehement, blunt, eloquent and readily expressive of her philosophy." But despite the accuracy of Burr's description of the difference In tone of Alice James's efforts in two genres, the letters do not merit scorn, nor does it detract from the elegant metaphysical quality of the Journal If we admire the realism of the letters. The letters Indeed are filled with commonplaces of life, but these only serve to check our fictive Imaginations healthily, lest we become too extravagant In our sense of what It meant for Al ice to have spent her life dying. She also spent It thinking, reading, socializing, laughing, loving. In her young adulthood, marriage obsessed her, as It did Henry, so that she wrote In 1876, acceding to that which Isabel Archer was to fear, that "matrimony seems the only successful occupation that a woman can undertake." She tried to find another for herself. Living in what we recognize as a typical nineteenth-century world of female supports and society, Alice had first her "Bee," the sewing and Intellectual society of women of which she was a member from 1867 until her death In 1892. Then she had Miss TIcknor's Society for Studies at Home, where she participated in correspondence programs aimed at teaching other women history, As she wrote to a female friend who seemed to her to lack vocation, "I wish you had some work to do that amused you half as much as my society work does me." And Miss TIcknor's gave her Katharine Loring, whose very existence she was convinced others would covet if only they knew. "I wish you could know Katharine Loring," she wrote...