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Reviewed by:
  • Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James
  • Anthony Louis Marasco
Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James. By Susan E. Gunter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2009.

"Dearest William," Henry James wrote his brother on April 13, 1904: "I have horribly delayed to make proper response to two so interesting & affecting letters from you, . . . the second beautifully taken down from dictation by our precious Alice; the first written by yourself under the stress of illness—she being away at Chicago. Besides which, dearest Alice, I have a beautiful one from you" (Skrupskelis et al., The Correspondence of William James, III: 268). It was not unusual for anybody at the time to post in the mail letters addressed to one person but meant to be read by others as well. It was a custom of the age. So it should not surprise if Henry James wrote [End Page 133] his brother William while also acknowledging as a recipient his wife, Alice Howe Gibbens James. What makes the passage unusually interesting, however, is the light it shines on an otherwise mute corner of the later Jamesian correspondence. When late in life William James was increasingly affected by a worsening heart condition, his wife took extraordinary measures to ensure that his last work should not be written down 'under the stress of illness.' In those years, whenever William James was at the writing desk, his wife was not too far away, taking dictation, organizing material, making notes, revising drafts. One might even be tempted to say that without her we would have but very little late work to his name. So a curious question presents itself. Given that James made his name on his late work, Have we overlooked the role Alice played in the making of William James? After reading Susan E. Gunter's subtly persuasive Alice in Jamesland, one cannot help be convinced we have. The writing of Varieties of Religious Experience is a case in point. To allow her husband to draft and deliver the set of lectures that would eventually become the book (the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, 1901-2), Alice agreed to go to Europe with him for two years so that he could write them while undergoing treatment at Bad Nauhein and in Rome. The arrangement was near perfect for the man as for the author, since Alice personified the ideal reader of the book to a fault. Gunter is also very perceptive about this, and does not deny that it was through Alice's advocacy that James 'lowered the lights' to give subliminal reality and psychic clairvoyance a chance. It would be unfair, however, to blame her for what is still redolent of the nineteenth century in James's late work. As it would be hard to disagree with Gunter that it was Alice who brought some semblance of working other to the complex family she married in. Had she not liked Henry as much as she did, for example, there is some reasonable doubt that William might have been able to keep in touch with his younger brother the way he did after their marriage. Barred some new discovery, Gunter's book is likely to remain the definitive biography of Alice Howe Gibbens James for the foreseeable future. A must read for everyone interested in the ever expanding 'Jamesland' lying at the midst of our intellectual history.

Anthony Louis Marasco
International University College, Torino (Italy)
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