Strength of Alice James

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 18

Strength of Alice James

The Diary of Alice James. Edited and introduced by Leon Edel. Penguin, 1983. 233 pp. Index. $7.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley)

The diary of a chronic invalid whose longest outings were to the fields beside her cottage, and who throughout the last three years of her life kept the journal “to lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me,” scarcely sounds appealing or lively reading. In fact, “The Diary of Alice James,” now printed for the first time in paperback, is an intensely human document, full of wit and humour, and asserting on every page the courage and intelligence of the woman who used it as “an outlet to the geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass.”

Alice James, born in New York in 1848, was the youngest child and only daughter in a brilliantly intelligent and talented family. Her brother, William, became an eminent psychologist, her beloved brother, Henry, the still more famous novelist. After a happy, healthy childhood, she declined mysteriously and rapidly in health, and it seems probable that at least part of her condition was frustration at the restricted life a Victorian woman was expected to lead. In 1889, by which time she was living in England and was permanently confined to a wheelchair or bed, she began to keep this journal, and the last entry was dictated to her faithful companion only a few hours before her death in March, 1892. Even the daily minutiae she includes are written of in a lively manner, but it is her observations on the British political scene and her comments on the English way of life, as seen by an American, which make this a biting and perceptive comment on the Victorian age. “One of the Bensons who has been living in lowa has come back to England to educate his boys. He said he was about sending them to some school in the United States but thought they would get rabbit-shooting in England, so he came back; if they are to be an ornament to their country ’tis surely wise to develop their instincts for slaughter.” Her brother Henry, a constant visitor to her bedside, kept her au fait with all the London gossip which is gleefully related in these pages and which provides a great deal of interest in the reading. But more than all this, Alice James’s diary is a page of personal history which illuminates the courage and intelligence in an otherwise obscure life. Henry wrote of it, “I have been immmensely impressed with the thing as a revelation of a moral and personal picture. It is heroic in its individuality, its independence — let alone the rich irony and humour.” In this diary a tragic and frustrated life produced a book of strength, humour and beauty which can take its place on the bookshelf beside those of her famous brothers.