Her father was a lawyer, banker, and owner of the Mail and Express newspaper, as well as a founder and president of the New York State Bar Association.

[1] Alice was known to her family as "Angela" because of the sweetness of her disposition and the beauty of her face, well-demonstrated by her attached portrait.

She was no true angel, however, and climbed a tree against her father's specific interdiction and fell out fracturing her thoracic spine.

She grew up deformed in Woodlea, a mansion on the Hudson now occupied as the clubhouse of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club.

Frederick Gardner Cottrell, later a well-known American chemist, persuaded Morris to tackle the problem of an auxiliary language, but objectively and scientifically.

[5] She was courted for some time by Dave Hennen Morris (1872–1944) who saw her face around the funnel of the steamer to France and knew at once that he must marry her.

In 1999, Julia S. Falk of Michigan State University published the book Women, Language and Linguistics – Three American Stories from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (320 pp.).