Alice James

Alice James (1848–1892) was an American diarist, the youngest child and only daughter of theologian Henry James Sr. and the sister of philosopher William James and novelist Henry James. Born in New York City, she grew up in a household that moved frequently between New York, Newport, Boston, and Europe in pursuit of her father's intellectual interests.

Educated at home and in private schools in Geneva, Bonn, and Paris, she had an unusually rigorous schooling for a girl of her era but was steered away from any professional course. In her late teens she suffered the first of several breakdowns and spent much of her adult life as an invalid, treated for what doctors of the time labeled hysteria, neurasthenia, and rheumatic gout.

In 1884 she moved to England with her companion Katharine Peabody Loring, settling first in Bournemouth and later in London, near her brother Henry. From 1889 until her death she kept a diary, dictating later entries to Loring as her health failed. The diary, by turns acid, witty, and politically engaged on Irish Home Rule and women's suffrage, was unpublished in her lifetime.

She died of breast cancer in Kensington in March 1892. Loring had four copies of the journal printed privately in 1894 for the family. A full edition, edited by Leon Edel, did not appear until 1964 as The Diary of Alice James.

The name Alice comes from the Old French Aaliz, a shortened form of the Germanic Adalheidis, meaning noble kind or noble sort. She carried it as the Boston-bred diarist whose late-life journal, published seventy years after her death, established her literary reputation.