72. Go Ask Alice
KIM ASKEW: Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode, everyone. I'm Kim Askew, here with my writing partner and BFF Amy Helmes.
AMY HELMES: Hi, everyone.
KIM: So I want to start this mini off with a bit of a mea culpa. It's something that's occurred to me more than once since we started this podcast (about a year ago at this point). Amy, you know that several years ago I wrote my master's thesis on Henry James. It was titled "Henry James's The Wings of the Dove as Literary Detective Novel." I've been a longtime devotee of James, and I very much enjoyed researching and writing this thesis. And I want to give a shout-out to my wonderful thesis advisor, Dr. Millie Kidd. She's the director of the Master's Program in Humanities at Mount St Mary's. But ever since we talked with our first guest, Anne Boyd Rioux, about James's friend and fellow writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (that's back in episode 11, if you want to check it out) I've kind of felt a little bit guilty.
AMY: What? Why? Explain, please.
KIM: Okay. It's because now that I know about all these amazing ladies whose books have been forgotten or left out of the quote-unquote “canon,” I honestly wish I'd written my thesis on one of them instead. There's all this scholarship on James out there, and even though I felt like I had something somewhat unique to say, I don't necessarily think the world needed like another hundred-whatever pages on that James. So anyway, while I can't go back and rewrite my thesis (thank god), I can do an episode on James's sister Alice. She was a diarist, who like Fenimore Woolson, became just another footnote in James's story. So that's what we're going to do today. Let's get to know Alice James! Amy, did you know anything about her before we started working on this mini episode?
AMY: Um, no. And so if you're buying tickets for a guilt trip, you better just sign me up too, as your traveling companion, because I knew basically zilch. But first off, I want to back up and say, I do think it would have been awesome if you had done a thesis on a lost lady, but we're doing this now, right? We're getting the word out there now.
KIM: Yeah, this kind of makes up for it right?
AMY: More than makes up for it.
KIM: Okay. Good. I feel better.
AMY: But yeah, getting back to Alice James, I obviously knew of Henry James, and I knew of William James, his brother, who was a psychologist and philosopher. But whenever I heard Alice James mentioned, to be perfectly honest I just assumed that was William's wife, because William did have a wife named Alice. So it gets a little bit confusing. So William and his wife, Alice, were friends with Jane and Mary Findlater, the Scottish sister-writing team that we did a previous episode on. So I guess that explains some of my confusion. I didn't even know there was a sister in the mix, so you are miles ahead of me in knowing about this and, um, yeah, let's do it. I'm looking forward to knowing more.
KIM: Okay. Great. So, I became interested in her while I was working on my thesis. I want to quote a letter that Henry wrote to his brother William in 1888, and it was regarding his sister's response to the "Jack the Ripper" murders happening at that time.
AMY: My antenna just went up a bit more.
KIM: Yep. Yes. I knew you would like that. Henry and his sister, Alice, were living abroad in London then and Henry specifically described how the murders were affecting their sister Alice: “She was wuthend, [that's a German term, meaning "furious or lively"] to a degree that almost constituted robust health," he writes, intimating basically that Alice showed a lively interest in Scotland Yard as they were investigating these grizzly murders. I mean, of course that's going to pique my interest and other people's too. Amy, there's a novel called What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen that has Henry, William and Alice helping Scotland Yard solve the murders. How cool is that?
AMY: Sibling detectives in Victorian London with a literary spin? Oh my God, what a great idea for a novel, and I want to read it. Um, and then I'm also really sad that Alice missed out on the true crime podcast sensation. She would have loved them as much as I do, clearly. I love that she was so enthralled by the Whitechapel murders, as they're called.
KIM: I I mean, she could have been a murder podcaster had she lived now. I mean, if we're going down that road, I could see her really doing that.
AMY: Yeah, but going back to this letter that you quoted from, it's sort of implies that Alice wasn't always in the best of health if it took these grizzly murders to sort of get her animated and feeling, you know, enlivened about something.
KIM: Yeah, Alice had a lot of health issues. But of course, because this was the Victorian era, they fell under the hodge-podge label of "hysteria." And I actually just picked up a book on that called Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth In a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn. I feel like we're going to be doing a more detailed episode on this at some point, because it's fascinating.
AMY: Oh my God. I just am thinking of all these lazy Victorian doctors who didn't want to make any effort to actually diagnose a woman's physical ailments other than to call her hysterical. It reminds me of Rachel Vorona Cote's book Too Much. If you remember last spring, she was a guest on our show.
KIM: Right. That was a great episode; that absolutely fits in with this. Anyway, back to Alice. Do you want to fill us in on her basic info?
AMY: Yes. So I got to do a little digging for this. As I said, I didn't know anything starting off, so it's all new to me, but she was born in 1848, the youngest of five children. And because she never married, she lived with her parents almost her entire life. But when she was around 25, she taught history for three years at a Boston-based correspondence school for women. And those three years when she was teaching were reportedly among the most illness-free years that she had in her life.
KIM: Yeah. I found that to be fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. The time she felt least ill in her life was when she was working. And she was only able to do that for three years. It makes me think of our early episode on Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Homemaker, actually.
AMY: Right. That idea of really only being able to find fulfillment through work. And maybe Alice would have flourished if she had been able to work for a living like her brothers? Who knows? Or maybe she just wasn't able to work because she was so ill. But instead, with her time she wrote about her painfully slow decline towards death. Her diaries weren't published until half a century after she died, but the literary critic, Maria Popova writes that Alice “was an exquisite writer from whose pen seemed to flow the best of her brothers’ aptitudes — William’s insight into human psychology and Henry’s novelistic splendor of style — along with a sublimity of sentiment entirely her own.”So can you imagine if she had written novels like her brother? I mean, we would have eaten them up.
KIM: Absolutely. Unlike her brothers, Alice was mostly bedridden from a young age, though. When Susan Sontag made a play of Alice's diary, she even called it "Alice in Bed." Alice had a series of mental breakdowns and underwent many different types of treatment for her hysteria, including electric shock therapy. At one point, it got to where she even contemplated suicide. And she actually asked her father's permission to kill herself, and he did give it to her. He felt that her suffering was so bad that it would be all right if she chose to kill herself, but in the end, she actually chose to continue living. And when she wasn't having a breakdown or undergoing treatment for hysteria, she was apparently a very lively companion. That trip to London with Henry that I referred to earlier, Henry actually wrote back to William in Cambridge that Alice's “conversation is brilliant and trenchant . . . she is the best company in the place.”
AMY: It would be interesting to read a biography of her and find out if they have any ideas now what was ailing her, if it was a physical complaint that could have been remedied, or if she did have some psychological issues.
KIM: Yeah. From what I've ... just the research I've done so far, which admittedly has been somewhat limited, it seems like it probably was sort of a response to mental things that she was dealing with.
AMY: LIke depression, maybe? Or bipolar?
KIM: Depression. Yeah. exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
AMY: I was just wondering if there was an underlying physical thing.
KIM: Yeah. I'm curious as well to dive deeper into that.
AMY: So after her parents died, she inherited some family money, and then Henry made over his share of his inheritance to her. So she was able to live independently, and she also had a "Boston marriage," a term that we've referred to in other episodes. This was a permanent relationship with another woman, Katherine Peabody Loring, who was her companion and nurse, and possibly more, toward the end of her life. Alice passed away from breast cancer at age 43 in 1892, 10 years after her father's death. Katherine Loring was in charge of the funeral arrangements and Alice had given Loring her diaries, but Henry didn't want them published because he thought it might "endanger his own social standing." Kim, why do you think he was so threatened by these diaries? Was she spilling a lot of family secrets or were they controversial in some way?
KIM: Well, I have a quote from Katherine Winton Evans in a piece she wrote for The Washington Post, and it says that, in Alice's diary, “she dared at last unleash her critical faculties on a variety of subjects from politics to the British upper classes. She was as tart and prickly in her diary as she must have been in person.” So I could only guess that the way that she wrote about people in her diaries was maybe something that was more for the dinner table and not for the wider public, according to Henry, anyway.
AMY: No punches pulled. Bring it on. So wait, have you read her diaries?
KIM: Nope. I have not read her diaries yet. Nope. It's ahead of me. I'm excited to do that.
AMY: All right. Yes, I'm really interested in checking them out now that I hear there's maybe some gossip and some prickly opinions in there. So despite big brother's wishes, eventually her diaries were published beginning in the 1930s, and she's since evolved into something of a feminist icon for struggling to find her voice through her illness. She actually wrote, “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.”
KIM: I wonder what Freud would have to say about her use of the word ejaculation there. Anyway, it's interesting, we were talking earlier about what she might have been had she been able to work for a living, because she actually wrote to her brother William near the end of her life: “Don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else… Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?”
AMY: You have to kind of admire that self-respect and confidence that she clearly had in herself. The first thing I want to go do now is read that Susan Sontag play that you mentioned, "Alice in Bed." It sounds like Sontag kind of merges Alice James's story with that of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which sounds brilliant.
KIM: Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is just an intro discussion for maybe a later, longer episode on Alice James. She's so cool.
AMY: Yeah. So one of our things we'll be doing in 2022, homework assignment, is go read her diaries. And listeners, if you have anything to add on the subject, let us know. I'm sure there are people out there listening that know a lot more than we do about her.
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: So that's all for today's podcast. Be sure to tune in next week when we'll be dusting off another great work from a woman writer who deserves a bit more of the spotlight, we think.
KIM: Don't forget to check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com, for more information on this episode and others, and be sure to keep those five-star reviews coming over at Apple Podcasts. We are so grateful for them.
AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes