Death and the Maiden

Mary-Kay Wilmers

• Alice James by Jean Strouse
  Cape, 367 pp, £9.95, February 1981, ISBN 0 224 01436 6
• The Death and Letters of Alice James edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
  University of California Press, 214 pp, £6.95, March 1981, ISBN 0 520 03745 6

Alice James died in London at the age of 43, regretting only that she would not have the pleasure of knowing and reporting herself dead. The reporting was done instead by her favourite brother: ‘I went to the window to let in a little more of the afternoon light, and when I went back to the bed she had drawn the breath that was not succeeded by another,’ Henry James wrote to their eldest brother, William, in America, as if, in the now fashionable way, defining death to a Martian. Eager to do what justice she could to the occasion, Alice had sent William a farewell telegram the day before, which Henry later confirmed. William, nonetheless, feared that her death might simply be an illusion: ‘her neurotic temperament & chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance-tricks to play themselves upon.’ It was very like William – or her idea of William – to try to rob her of her greatest, her only achievement.