Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, daughter of Henry James Sr. of Albany, New York, and Mary Robertson Walsh.

She went to a Boston school called Miss Clapp’s, where she met Frances Rollins Morse, one of her life-long friends often cited in her published diary and correspondence.

[2] James taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston-based correspondence school for women founded by Anna Eliot Ticknor.

In 1888, twenty years after James was "overwhelmed by violent turns of hysteria", she wrote in her diary that she was both suicidal and homicidal.

As Alice was suffering from breast cancer, which would claim her life in London in 1892 at age 43, her brother William James wrote her a letter explaining how much he pitied her.

"[citation needed] William also suggested that she might benefit from hypnotism and recommended the London physician, Charles Lloyd Tuckey.

Full of witty, acerbic, insightful comments on English life and manners, it included excerpts from various publications to support her opinions.

[citation needed] Henry, one of Alice's brothers, read this work with deep alarm (because of its candid indiscretions about family and friends) but also with enormous admiration.

The diary, Henry said, displayed for him Alice's great "energy and personality of intellectual and moral being," but also, "puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime—that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' person—in the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.

"In looking back now," she wrote toward the end of her life, "I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 [when she was 19 and 20] when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria.

As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ..."[8]: 149 She eventually found, she continued, that she had to let loose of her body, giving up "muscular sanity" in order to preserve her mind: "So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing.

There were also times where his letters to her were candidly erotic—he would describe her physical and personality characteristics and state how “desirable” and “lovable” they made her.

[10] Anna Robeson Brown Burr edited and wrote an introduction to Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal (1934).

Susan Sontag wrote a play about James, Alice in Bed (1993), which seems to waver between sympathy and impatience with its subject.