About Alice in Bed
Hardcover: 325 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint (October 13, 2015)
One of her brothers is the greatest English novelist of his time; another is inventing American psychology. The James family is famous in Boston and New York for its brilliance, eccentricity, and mesmerizing conversation. Alice James is no less remarkable than her brothers (Henry and William), but there is a problem: she is a girl. Her education has been haphazard, there are no colleges for women, and young ladies are expected to be Angels in the House. No one could be less suited to angelic domesticity than the tart-tongued, defiantly original Alice. She must chart her own course, but how?
Falling mysteriously ill while crossing the Atlantic at age 38, she becomes confined to her bed in a lodging house in provincial England. Thus begins her second life, when she recalls or redreams her life and struggles to make sense of it. How did her collapse begin? Was it “Father’s Ideas”? The night she drank absinthe and fell in love with a girl? The time William went to the asylum? The childhood years in Paris, when Father fired each of her governesses in turn? Was it the horrors of the Civil War, the erotic relations with the Temple cousins, the day Henry deserted her and sailed to Europe? Was it simply the oddness of “growing up James”?
Alice in Bed is an absorbing, poignant, sometimes hilarious journey through the Gilded Age with one of literature’s most unusual and captivating heroines.
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About Judith Hooper
Judith Hooper was an editor at Omni magazine and is the author of Of Moths and Men and co-author of The Three-Pound Universe and Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman?: A Catalogue of Revolutionary Tools for Higher Consciousness. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Judith Hooper’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, April 18th: BookNAround
Tuesday, April 19th: Dwell in Possibility
Wednesday, April 20th: Puddletown Reviews
Thursday, April 21st: A Bookish Way of Life
Tuesday, April 26th: A Book A Week
Wednesday, April 27th: Patricia’s Wisdom
Thursday, April 28th: Building Bookshelves
Friday, April 29th: Julz Reads
Monday, May 2nd: Thoughts on This ‘n That
Monday, May 9th: A Bookish Affair
Wednesday, May 11th: Time 2 Read
Thursday, May 12th: SJ2B House of Books
Friday, May 13th: A Literary Vacation
Monday, May 16th: Kahakai Kitchen
Thursday, May 19th: View from the Birdhouse
Friday, May 20th: Just One More Chapter
Thursday, May 26th: Worth Getting in Bed For
Thursday, May 26th: 5 Minutes for Books – author Q&A