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4. Alice in Jamesland
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
+* m^_b[cWhoWdZ^[dho`Wc[iih. had already made it clear they would be delighted if Alice undertook the task of marrying their eldest son, Henry James Jr. also welcomed her. No one knew William’s intense physical and intellectual hungers better, hungers Alice would have to appease. Henry told Alice that William was “sensibly improved,” which probably meant that he was no longer suicidal or severely depressed. Gently, he warned Alice that in marrying William she was taking on not only a man whose past emotional history could at best be labeled unstable but the entire James family. Her vocation would be a wider one than she might have imagined: “I have an idea, too, that since I left America he [William] has sensibly improved. . . . I hope you are seeing a good deal of the rest of them—for I hold it to be part of the bargain that you are engaged, more or less, to the whole family.”1 William’s youngest brother, Bob, wrote to Alice from Wisconsin as soon as he heard the news: “I can conceive of his vision as only being realised among the goddesses.” Like Henry, he suggested that Alice would have to be responsible for more than one James: “I owe very much more to Willy than is the lot of most men to owe a brother and it is a pleasant thing for me to believe that in time to come I may be allowed to owe his wife a great deal also.”2 Wilkie also welcomed Alice warmly. He considered William’s * Alice in Jamesland Wb_Y[_d`Wc[ibWdZ ++ engagement to be the most important event that had ever happened in the James family. He knew how deeply his brother cared for Alice: “Willie was a born martyr, and if you had not reciprocated his affection, he would have loved you I firmly believe until the end of his life: he would in all moral aspects have been wedded to your being.”3 There remains no record of a welcoming letter from sister Alice. At the same time the engagement was announced she took to her bed.4 Mother Mary told Bob that her daughter’s illness was “‘a nervous breakdown of a very serious character—an aggravated recurrence of her old troubles.’”5 If she hadn’t already realized just how high a place the James family held in Cambridge and Boston society, Alice must have known they were an important family within weeks of announcing her engagement. There were brilliant elements in her union. No less a personage than Harvard’s president, Charles William Eliot, with his wife, Grace Hopkinson Eliot, called on her to extend their congratulations.6 Though Alice came from an unknown family in unknown Weymouth, no one, perhaps not even her future sister-in-law (whose thoughts were never officially voiced), objected to her marrying William. Alice’s childhood friend Kate Putnam, still in California and now Mrs. John Hooker, visited Cambridge the month before the wedding. Kate found Alice beautiful and lively, even prettier than her younger sister Mary.7 Alice would make a lovely bride.8 Elizabeth “Bessie” Glendower Evans, who knew Alice during the '..&s, described her thick, soft hair, her great, deep eyes, her heavy features, and her youthful, “wild-rose complexion,” a combination that together made her quite beautiful.9 Kate tried to persuade Alice to marry before Kate went home to California. The child who befriended Kate in '.+, had become a remarkable woman. “In fact, I am in love with her, and quite envy Dr. James,” Kate announced to her sister Minnie.10 Alice planned an autumn wedding, but the couple decided to move the date forward to '& July, perhaps so William could not change his mind one last time, or perhaps because Alice had misgivings about leaving her mother and sisters and did not want to wait any longer to make this momentous change, or perhaps even so Kate could attend. Despite her lively manner Alice showed the sobriety that had characterized her as a teenager. As she rushed to prepare for the ceremony she was glad to be busy, “for the leaving home and solemn change makes these last [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:11 GMT) +, Wb_Y[_d`Wc[ibWdZ days very grave ones,” she told Whittier.11 She hoped to take William to meet her friend before the wedding, but at the end of June she wrote to decline the...