Author Description

Alice James was the youngest child and only girl in a family that produced two of the most brilliant individuals in 19th-century America. Her elder brother, William, became the foremost psychologist of his time and her second brother, Henry, its greatest novelist. Her story reveals a troubled, highly intelligent woman who struggled to extract a sense of meaning and self from a life that had every outward appearance of failure. She was articulate, politically radical, funny, wise, difficult and intensely involved with her brothers and friends. This portrait sheds new light on the history of women, on the nature of Alice's mysterious illnesses and on the members of America's outstanding intellectual family. Jean Strouse has worked at the "New York Review of Books" and as a book critic at "Newsweek Magazine" and as a freelance reviewer of the "New Yorker", the "Washington Post", the "New York Review of Books" and "Vogue". She has won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished American history.