Volume 3, Number 6 · November 5, 1964
Death and the James Family
By Marius Bewley
The Diary of Alice James
edited by Leon Edel
Dodd, Mead, 241 pp., $5.00
The Diary of Alice James makes exacting demands of those readers who are not content with sickroom gossip or a few random anecdotes about William and Henry, but who wish to arrive at a responsible evaluation of the diarist, and the intellectual or spiritual style with which she occupied her niche in the James family. The task is not easy because for most readers Alice James will not, on first acquaintance, seem an appealing personality. There is often an aggressive shrillness in her voice which, coupled with an overdeveloped frankness, is sometimes accompanied by a slightly sour smell. But even on the level of the jeering invalid, she can often rise to the delightful and the wittily just.
Review, 3358 words
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