No Dose for It at the Chemist

William James​ is famous for two things: his work as a psychologist and philosopher, and his family. But before anything else he was a qualified doctor, who frequently pronounced on questions of bodily and mental health, his thought sharpened by his own experiences. He suffered from a bad back, a troublesome heart, poor eyesight and tenacious ‘suicidal musings’. Medical training and misery lay behind the metaphysics of works in which he debated existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.

John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he died. Fourteen texts are selected because James delighted in his summer house at Chocorua in New Hampshire for its ‘fourteen doors all opening outside’. The editors see this architecture as an image of James’s humane pluralism, issuing ‘standing invitations for guests to come and go as they like’. One talk included in the book reports that, when he spent a week at the Assembly Grounds, Chautauqua Lake, an experimental utopian community organised around ‘perpetually flowing soda-water fountains’ and ‘no zymotic diseases’, he was only too delighted to leave. Behind the community’s perfect ‘atmosphere of success’, he found no effort and no zest, and without these he concluded life definitely wasn’t worth living. In contemplating how we might live well, James was preoccupied by ‘the everyday choices of the individual’, often within their families, which he hoped could lead to collective good health. To this self-help approach, he sometimes admitted the additional need for an ‘inflow of super-personal help’ – usually some form of access to religious experience. He was wary of new public measures for regulating wellbeing – the emergent institutional spaces and official discourses of public health of the late 19th century, including health boards, sanitation programmes, disease control and the discipline of medical statistics – and feared they would result in a purely ‘economic evaluation of life’.

James’s resolute individualism faced its challenges: he lived through various public health crises, including the ‘Russian flu’ pandemic of the early 1890s, the first major pandemic of the industrialised world, driven by railways and the trade routes of global capitalism. Spreading from Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) in May 1889, across continental Europe, it reached the United States by late December. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that ‘Londoners, and indeed all English people, will feel a certain amount of alarm, or at all events considerable interest, in the accounts which are daily published of the approach of a strange and apparently somewhat unknown disease – which the newspapers are calling influenza.’ It’s now conjectured that this ‘influenza’ may have been a coronavirus, with waves across the next two years and a pattern of neurological disturbances on the back of respiratory distress, all of which overwhelmed available healthcare. James’s sister, Alice, who was wintering at Leamington Spa, wrote to him to describe ‘a wretchedly sick’ season, ‘not only the grippe but illness of all kinds so that the doctors are almost dead, altho’ there are forty of ’em.’ She commiserated with William too: his wife and some of his children appear to have contracted a mild form of the virus, though all were spared severe illness.

Alice, the most extreme invalid of the James family, had not wished to be spared. After years of ‘many convulsions – digestive, mental and sentimental’, she hoped for what she referred to in her diary as ‘Roosian symptoms’: anything to help her long quest to end her own life. But even after her nurse suffered a ‘mild attack’, Alice failed to contract the disease. For her lack of susceptibility, she blamed herself, writing in her diary: ‘There is no hope of my sowing a microbe,’ though it ‘would sweep away so clearly my little rubbish-heap. An infant bacillus would make one bite of me!’ Raised alongside William, with his conviction that we make and unmake the health of our own bodies, and his philosophy of emotion which held that we feel sad because we cry, who else could Alice blame for her morbid incompetence but herself?

Be Not Afraid of Life is a self-help book of a kind: Kaag and van Belle are interested in James’s capacity to be a philosophical therapist for the multitudes of individually desperate ‘sick souls’. Their anthology urges readers to overcome difficulties of mind and mood by way of James’s ‘gospel of cheer’, which should lead towards moments of ‘wonder and hope’. This attempt to use James as mental tonic has a long pedigree. Harvard invited him to deliver his address ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ to the students of the Cambridge YMCA after a spate of campus suicides because they thought he could help the students help themselves, and indeed he stepped up to the lectern as a rousing voluntarist: ‘Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.’ His determined emphasis on the power of the individual to shape their own health by continual effort and appropriate habits, Kaag and van Belle suggest, makes James as relevant as ever to ‘our students’, since this strain of American self-reliance ‘resonates with what they have been taught about liberty … One need only put one’s back into it.’

Emma Sutton’s book offers a vital counterpoint to this, by showing that – when it came to himself – James recognised the limits of self-reliance. She accompanies his public words with accounts of his private pain, including a ‘dorsal infirmity’ so severe that it left him contemplating suicide in the late 1860s. His literal inability to ‘put one’s back into it’ reminds us that the philosophical anti-determinism of his public lectures was at best complicated, or hard-won. She reproduces pages from James’s 1890s notebooks containing his thoughts about Stoicism, written at a time when he badly needed it: he was suffering from what he believed to be fatal ‘heart strain’. These passages are riddled with revisions and signs of spasmodic, strained thinking. Even the phrases that emerged as forthright had considerable birth pangs, as James performed what he called ‘inner work’ on his own understanding. For example, he attempted to commend the Stoic attitude of indifference towards misfortunes like illness: ‘You have but to disdain the pinched and mumping sick room attitude,’ the final sentence reads. The manuscript reveals that this doctrinaire view was shot through with hesitation, as James havered between the adjectives ‘pinched’ and ‘trembling’, eventually crossing out ‘trembling’. Further notes show that he was under considerable mental pressure as he tried to work out in his writing a fear that Stoicism, for all its virtues, might represent straining, rather than training, the mind to achieve endurance: ‘Stoicism, with its muscles never relaxed always tense, always tensely sustaining holding its breath in an attitude which is ready to lapse into its opposite, & break down.’ James’s own prose here cannot relax: ‘never’ is ready to ‘lapse into its opposite’, ‘always’, and ‘relaxed’ into ‘tense’. This composition, strained to near breakdown, suggests the William James of unresolved, irresolvable contradictions that Sutton repeatedly presents to us, a figure who ‘appears to have advocated for both health and unhealth’.

His prose revisions recall Alice’s unrelenting efforts in the one form of work her invalid state permitted: transcribing her own ‘inner work’ to the pages of letters and diaries. The final entry in her diary, written by her companion, Katharine Loring, soon after Alice’s death on 6 March 1892, registers the tenacity of this shaping of the self: ‘All through Saturday the 5th and even in the night, Alice was making sentences. One of the last things she said to me was to make a correction in the sentence of March 4th “moral discords and nervous horrors”.’

Behind the forced equanimity of his words on any public platform, then, James was acutely sensitive to both his own disabling pain and the wriggling ironies of his super-subtle family, who complicated any ideas he might profess about healthful and happy lives. In the end, it was personal experience and family that shaped James’s thought about the way health determined life’s values: he asked questions about marriage, employment, journeys to Europe, self-culture, social relations – a comparable canvas to the novels of his brother Henry. Above all, William wanted – for himself and others – to be well enough to fulfil a more conventional plot than one of Henry’s: to marry and to work (including ‘inner work’, or self-culture).

Contemplating marriage, he became exercised about ‘right breeding’ in a post-Darwinian world: should he ignore his family tendencies to infirmity and nervous complaints, and marry Alice Gibbens, whom he had met at the Radical Club in Boston in 1876? At first, James resolved to take his weaknesses to the grave, unreplicated in the world, but then allowed himself to undo this resolution. Four of his five children survived infancy and were mostly robust, though his wife, aware of his self-accusatory horror of hereditary taint, later tried to keep his daughter’s first nervous breakdown from him. But not all the effects of his marriage on other family members could be kept from him. Conspicuous by her absence at his wedding in 1878 was the other Alice, his sister: the James family symbiosis seemed to mean that William’s decision that he was well enough to marry precipitated Alice’s collapse into invalidism and what her mother diagnosed as a sustained ‘feeling of inability to meet life’.

Work, the other pillar of the healthful, was also a vexed question in his own case. He overcame personal crises of health and of will before graduating with his MD in 1869. Yet he never practised medicine, experiencing growing ‘disillusionment with the scientific laws of health’ and instead seeking ways to think ‘more deeply’ (as Kaag and van Belle would say) about physical and mental flourishing – leading him to become the academic, public intellectual and practical moral philosopher we recognise, guiding others on how to live.

One of Sutton’s main aims is to show that, even in these roles, his medical training never left him. She persuasively argues that ‘the prevention of disease and the promotion of health were the paradigmatic territory within which James came to rethink and realign his epistemological loyalties.’ To understand his principle of ‘habit’, for example, we could consider its connections with the late 19th century’s ‘hygienic programme’, which aimed to regulate small-scale daily actions of mind and body. His concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’, the flow of impressions through the mind, gains from being considered alongside his earlier popular science writing about temperance, which was sharpened by his role caring for his alcoholic brother, Bob. Years before publishing on ‘The Stream of Thought’ in The Principles of Psychology (1890), James articulated his model of the mind as a stream in his lectures on ‘Physiology and Hygiene’ at Harvard. In one of these, written up for the Boston Evening Transcript in 1881 as a ‘Scientific View of Temperance’, he argued that the anaesthetic power of alcohol ‘abolishes collateral trains of thought’. James’s model for moral sublimity – the mother who nurses her suffering child through her own illness – draws, Sutton’s mode of reading suggests, on his wife’s nursing, while unwell herself, of their son Herman, our ‘wonderful human turtle’, as James described him to Aunt Alice.

Herman died from complications of whooping cough in July 1885, aged seventeen months, after which the Jameses became still more open to less orthodox models of medical care. They consulted the spiritualist Leonora Piper (or ‘Dr Phinuit’), about whom James wrote in one of his studies in psychical research, ‘Certain Phenomena of Trance’. This was to the scorn of his sister Alice, who dismissed spiritualism as a panacea for ‘spongy minds’. In 1909 he undertook 21 sessions with a Christian Science healer for chest pains, and at least ten separate courses of treatment with ‘mind-curers’, fashionable practitioners of an art of meditative cure through affirmation, with some affinities to modern mindfulness. Alice would have been sceptical about this too. Her diary for 9 November 1890 documented inviting over the mind-curer Susan Bowles for some ‘fun’. ‘She bade me shut my eyes,’ Alice recorded, ‘and say over to myself: “I am a child of God and as such pure, perfect and without flaw!” My mind of course began skipping about the horizon.’ As ever, Alice, like the girl who shared her name in Lewis Carroll’s novels, relished the possibilities of resistant literalism for its power to take the strange philosophies and practices of others to the brink, from which extremity life began to look impossible, absurd, liveable and funny.

Scene One
Blackout. (ALICE’s bedroom.)
NURSE’s voice: Of course you can get up.
ALICE’s voice: I can’t.
NURSE’s voice: Won’t.
ALICE’s voice: Can’t.

This is the opening scene of Alice in Bed, a play by another writer who considered how to regard the pain of others, Susan Sontag. Sontag sets Alice James, whom she blends with Carroll’s Alice, in bed in London in 1890. There are visits from Harry (Henry) and mentions of Wim (William), and a Mad Hatter’s tea party attended by Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Myrtha from Giselle and Kundry from Parsifal. The back and forth of the opening dialogue between Alice and Nurse – ‘can’, ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘can’t’ – plays out a Jamesian dilemma about the invalid’s responsibility. Kaag and van Belle outline a version of this dilemma when they discuss the depressed person’s recalcitrance towards self-cure: while those of us who are sick-souled ‘must be involved in our own salvation’, we are ‘ill-equipped’ to be so. We struggle to turn ‘can’t’ into ‘won’t’, let alone ‘will’.

‘When the black dog of depression darkens our doors’, they observe, we ‘give ourselves over to the … “mattress-grave”’. They are referring to Heinrich Heine’s term, Matratzengruft, for the bed on which he endured eight years of paralysis, but it’s hard not to have in mind Sontag’s Alice, who, like a topsy-turvy princess and the pea, lies under ten thin mattresses and yet can still feel too much of the world. On black dog days, Kaag and van Belle say, ‘what would be best for our sanity strikes us as the worst: to get up, when we can, and venture into the light of day.’ From this knot of impossibility comes their case for reading James, who can play Nurse, reminding us of the curative powers of exercising free will. But, as Alice wants us to ask, would it always be ‘best’ to get up? Her life and writings complicate a neat picture of health as merely a matter of flexing sufficient will to be well.

Neither​ Sutton nor Kaag/van Belle bring Alice James much into their account, for all that she seems unignorable in any full study of William. Writers from Alice’s biographer Jean Strouse to Jacqueline Rose have described the ‘telepathy of disease’ between the James siblings, who circulated symptoms throughout their lives. They found one another engrossing as medical cases. William wrote to Henry: ‘I blush to say that detailed bulletins of your bowels, stomach, etc as well as back are of the most enthralling interest to me.’ Alice (sister) instructed Alice (wife) in a letter: ‘These details, medical, are for William’s delectation.’ They were enthralled, sustained and soothed by continual promises to one another that the family was a corporate body, pooling its ills. Alice took particular solace in Henry’s assurances that ‘my nerves are his nerves and my stomach his stomach.’ She preferred this fraternal identification even to sharing her ill-health with William, who, on occasion, suffered from a surfeit of sympathy, or moralised too much. Henry’s subtler ministrations made him Alice’s bedside ‘angel’.

Alice’s virtual absence from these two books may, of course, redress her long dominance. ‘We are so wholly immersed in Alice’s malady,’ her father wrote to another of his chronically ill children, Bob, ‘that we are apt to think there is no one else sick and suffering in the world.’ Yet, if readers are to follow Kaag and van Belle in turning to William James for solace and even salvation, they might first want to see how well his philosophical therapies played out close to home: what did they do for someone as intimate with his thought, back and bowels as Alice? Alice poses some sharp questions of William’s philosophy, and for the claim that we should resurrect aspects of his forcible voluntarism in order to face life’s physical and mental challenges with less fear.

Alice read many of William’s meditations on life’s value, both in his publications and in their many letters, without being roused to Kaag and van Belle’s ‘wonder and hope’. For nearly the last two decades of William’s career Alice was no longer alive, but she had dated her death to long before that, to the ‘hideous summer’ of 1878 when William married the other Alice: after this, her existence was posthumous. That summer, Alice had sought from her father, and been granted, ‘full permission to end her life whenever she pleased’. Irritatingly for her, in the years since her soul-death, she had found no ready accomplices for assisted dying. What she described as her ‘wet blotting-paper’ constitution kept her just about alive, undesirable to microbes, while the strong ‘constabulary functions’ of her mind kept her just this side of insanity, unable to relieve herself from the obligations of reason.

She had disappointingly few organic diagnoses for most of her life. Until the stony fact of her breast cancer, Alice’s many and varied symptoms were a puzzle. They included ‘rheumatic gout’, neurasthenia, ‘emotional borborygmus’, ‘jangled nerves’, ‘constant “attacks” of all descriptions’ and ‘spinal neurosis’. She was acutely aware of what was entailed philosophically by ‘the fantastic nature of my troubles’, which she framed in terms resonant with William’s understanding of the relations between thought, action, will and feeling. Was she responsible for her own maladies? Could she exert her will sufficiently to win the battle over her body? Were feelings a cause or effect? Friends and physicians found that Alice’s philosophically strenuous approach to understanding pain made her a trying patient. She, in turn, mocked their wish to see ill-health in terms of simple aches and basic remedies. Her diary recorded that one old friend suddenly ‘removed herself to the planet Mars by asking me whether I was in pain anywhere at that moment’ – as if it were that simple! Clearly, Alice decided, ‘well people’ and ‘the weak’ were aliens to each other.

Cameos of comically confused physicians fill the pages of her diary and letters. Dr Wilmot, the staunchly realist doctor she consulted in January 1889, was teased for his fear of Alice’s metaphors:

One day I said to him, ‘My mind is simply cramped upon those people upstairs!’ Then that delicious look of cessation came into his face and I said, ‘I keep thinking about them all the time,’ then the mechanism started up again – ‘Oh, I see!’ He knew about cramps in the stomach but one in the mind was without the range of his practice and as Henry said, ‘He knew there was no dose for it at the chemist’s.’

After decades of falling ‘without the range’ of medical practice, then spending her final years in a climate of redoubtable English empiricists, Alice received her diagnosis of breast cancer (with cardiac complications) with elation. At last, ‘some palpable disease’ which could ‘satisfy the most inflated pathologic vanity’, and about which no one could ‘assure me I was personally responsible’. Cancer had lifted her out of ‘the formless vague’ and into the ‘heart of the sustaining concrete’.

Alice’s ailments kept her confined largely to a bedroom throughout her adult life. Her preference was for a room in London, where she felt the pavements and dense urban architecture reduced rheumatic risk, while the climate and grime ensured that there were ‘happily few gradations in the cosy-low studded blackness’. Like her counterpart in Wonderland, Alice struggled to go through doors, not because she was the wrong size for the aperture but because her ‘feeling of inability to meet life’ was soothed by remaining in dark, warm rooms. From her sofa or bed, she listened to soundscapes, thriving on ‘the roar of the city’. Her noisy neighbours included a lodging house’s ‘clerical animalcule’ with his ‘midnight revelries’; the hotel’s ‘23 uproarious children, who were allowed to turn the corridors into nurseries’; and ‘the Xmas rejoicings through the gossamer walls on one side, and the groans of the woman in labour in the room above’. After experiencing life in a South Kensington hotel, with its fifteen pianos, Alice joked that heaven is a place where ‘the non-piano player’ can drink the blood of the pianist. Yet she was no Proust, accessing involuntary memory from a cork-lined room: she enjoyed these flickers of vicarious existence as ways to ‘feel as if I were more in the world’ without giving up an inch of her isolation. While William strode out through one of his fourteen doors at Chocorua, and strained his heart hiking in the Adirondacks, Alice rejected nature and Transcendentalist sublimity. She recoiled from its ‘bare, crude blankness’, that of New England nature particularly, though she also took precautions not to see the sea at Bournemouth. Her mantra for a healthier life was to be ‘where Nature is not and where Man is!’ Only not with Man either, just in his vicinity. If Kaag and van Belle are right to claim that William’s fourteen-door house offers a powerful image of the philosopher as public physician, then what kind of thinking about life’s significance and its healthful conduct could come out of Alice’s ‘tomb-like’ closets?

On occasion, Alice did experiment with drinking in air through the window. William’s ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ quoted an exclamation from Walt Whitman: ‘To breathe the air, how delicious!’, suggesting that ‘if moods like this could be made permanent’ then the problem of life’s value would disappear. James failed to make such a mood permanent for himself but returned, whenever he could, to exercises like breathing in the air and urging others to remember pure joy. In January 1868 he wrote to his depressed friend Thomas Wren Ward:

Remember when old December’s darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached.

Alice noted down her equivalent epiphany of ‘cheer’ in her diary entry for 30 March 1890:

I have an exquisite thirty seconds every day: after luncheon I come in from my rest and before the window is closed I put my head out and drink in a long draft of the spring – made of the yellow glory of the daffodils on the balcony, the swelling twiggery of the old trees in front, the breathless house-cleaning of the rooks, the gradation of the light in transition, and the mystery of birth in the air.

Between these two ways of talking about how to encounter the world as joy, the differences between William and his sister stretch out. William’s rousing vision recalled the ‘whanging’ world of freewheeling gulls on the river where he had adventured during his medical studies; Alice’s introspective note recorded her habitual practice of breaching the cosy dark of her sick room with a mere half-minute’s perception of ‘the gradation of the light in transition’. Kaag and van Belle don’t quote Alice’s slanted subtleties, her microscopic registrations of the point when existence briefly ceases to be absurd and becomes ‘exquisite’. After all, anyone buying a book that bills itself as having such health-giving force for its readers might exercise their right of return if extracts from Alice, ‘shut up in her sick room’, were to disrupt the ‘whanging’ energies of William, standing firm at the lectern, or writing letters full of Amazonian air. But, for those less free than William to exercise their free will, or less inclined to believe in its supremacy, Alice’s notes could offer an antidote to the liberal resilience that scholarship tends to offer when it comes to William James.

William​ was wary of Alice’s alternative philosophy, and the fun she took in life’s radical absurdity. Writing to her friend Fanny Morse to suggest that, ‘ill or well’, one always stands ‘for what one was meant to stand for and what more can life give us?’, she noted that, when she had expressed a similar view to William, he ‘replied as if I were a hyena’, laughing mindlessly at the metaphysics of misery. Alice wasn’t fazed, continuing to stand for resistance to humbug, even when it appeared in William’s published writing. In 1890, he published ‘The Hidden Self’, a study of Pierre Janet’s work with hysteric patients, including Marie, who was nineteen years old, the age at which Alice experienced her first major collapse. Alice noted in her diary the paper’s clear psychological acuity – ‘William uses an excellent expression when he says in his paper on the “Hidden Self” that the nervous victim “abandons” certain portions of his consciousness’ – but felt that this characterisation was too easy and of absolutely no therapeutic value for patients like her: ‘I have never unfortunately been able to abandon my consciousness and get five minutes’ rest.’

One of her most characteristic quibbles with the limits of William’s philosophy as prophylactic or cure came in a letter of April 1887, where she thanked him for a sympathetic note about some of her recent symptoms before dismantling the philosophical foundations of his attempt at care.

I only took exception to your saying that no matter how ill one was, ‘This is life,’ and consequently of value and to be clung to. As, ‘vivre c’est sentir la vie,’ I never expect to be deader than I am now, nay, not even after the worms have gorged themselves, I breathed a gentle remonstrance or feeble protest. I have however to thank you for a moment of vivid life called forth by your unaccountable want of having in any way felt or perceived the ‘Princesse’. I was vehemently indignant for twenty-four hours.

Here, Alice rebuked the philosophical truisms through which William tried to make life valuable and joyful by declaring it so. The existential simplicity of ‘This is life’ is both not enough and far too much. In her reply, Alice weighed this inadequacy, spun out her typically visceral images, noted her objection, then turned to wit: the sensation, intensity and value of ‘life’, such as they are, consist not in the public declarations of the free agent, but rather in the rage and opportunities for mockery called forth in private. As Alice quipped on another occasion, ‘there isn’t anything to die of, but there are a good many jokes left still, and that’s the main thing after all.’

William could be funny, too, about the inflated claims for the public health benefits of philosophy. In the closing pages of her book, Sutton quotes from one of his letters to his wife, in which he reports meeting a woman who ‘said she had my portrait in her bedroom with the words written under it “I want to bring a balm to human lives”!!!!! Supposed to be a quotation from me!!!’ His eight exclamation marks place as much distance as they can between him and this therapeutic claim. He would, it seems, have found fault with the salvific premises of Be Not Afraid, of which it is not clear that even the editors are fully convinced. Retreating from the subtitle of his 2020 study, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, Kaag’s new anthology suggests that, while ‘William James might not save your life, his philosophy can help you be a little less afraid of living fully.’ The diminutive of this qualifying statement is characteristic of the editorial prose in Be Not Afraid, which is peppered with emollient phrases and small modesties: the book offers us ‘just a little more help’, ‘a bit of philosophical therapy’, ‘simply to see it a bit more clearly’ and ‘just the James we know and love’.

Sutton’s impressively lucid account shows that James’s self-care was, in the end, just about adequate for him to sustain an active, valuable life, even though he was never free for long from some form of ‘brain fag’, strain, ‘the black cloud’. As a private physician within his family, he had less success: he couldn’t keep Bob temperate or Alice well. His career as public physician was inconsequential. He dispensed much advice on training for healthful habits and laid the philosophical foundations for an individually strenuous model of healthcare as self-care. But, in the current climate of ever more personalised medicine and ever more global pandemics, only the most ardent reader of self-help guides is likely to be charmed by the note of desperate uplift with which Be Not Afraid frames William James’s thought. Sutton’s sedulous account of James, on the other hand, is a good reminder that there are intellectually sensible ways of thinking about philosophy as therapeutic and thoroughly involved with the practices of daily life, including its burdens of ill-health, while also posing questions about its conduct, values and measures of success.

It’s just that it leaves out Alice. And William reads best with Alice alongside him, spurring him on through dissenting letters and diary entries, and through the complicated example of her richly monotonous life as an unmarried, unemployed invalid. After her death, Henry wrote to William to suggest that her painful existence had, in fact, been a lived philosophical triumph, that ‘her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life.’ Rather than seek to affirm life or save the lives of others, Alice chose from early on to lead a posthumous existence, first securing psychic permission to die from her family, then sloughing off the practical components of the world to subsist in her dark womb-tombs across Piccadilly, South Kensington, Mayfair and Leamington. Yet, from these living burials, Alice produced records of her ‘long slow dying’ that are inexhaustible ‘documents humains’ (for all that she laughed off this term, when ventured by William). Alice’s extreme ‘solution’ to life’s problems may not offer a model, but her writing gestures towards alternative ways of thinking about the ‘sick-souled’ and ‘healthy-minded’, the ill and well.