ALICE IN BED

Our narrator is the playful, clear-seeing and passionate Alice James, younger sister of the two famous James brothers, Henry and William.

We meet her in 1889, in England, where Alice has been sidelined and is confined to her bed. We don’t know what’s wrong with Alice—no one does, though her brothers have inventive theories—and even the best of medical science offers no help. So with Alice in bed we travel to London and Paris, where the James children spend part of their unusual childhood. We sit with her around the James family’s dinner table, as she—the youngest and the only girl—listens to the intellectual elite, missing nothing. We meet her mercurial father, given to visions of angels, and firing each governess he hires for her in turn. Hooper’s novel includes an Afterword, “What was Wrong with Alice?,” an analysis of the varied psychological ills of the James family and Alice’s own medical history, untangled (as far as possible) from Victorian medical concepts and beliefs. Judith Hooper is an award-winning author whose books include Of Moths and Men, The 3-Pound Universe, and Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman? She was a finalist for an LA Times Book Award and the PEN/American Prize for First Nonfiction. A graduate of Smith College, she holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from U.C. Berkeley. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts and teaches creative nonfiction at Smith College.