In 1894 novelist Henry James and psychologist William James exchanged letters concerning four privately published copies of a diary written by their sister, Alice, who had died two years earlier at the age of forty-three. Although a brilliant conversationalist and an avid reader with a sharply satirical mind, Alice James would have been remembered, if at all, only as the tragically ill younger sister in a famous American family had her diary not been rescued from obscurity. Though he admired the wit and intelligence of his sister's observations, however, Henry feared that the diary might find its way into print without first being carefully edited. Many of his own remarks about other people emerged in his sister's diary, and the novelist, by then famous, shuddered to think that his words had not been kept private. As he wrote to William, "I was terribly scared and disconcerted--I mean alarmed--by the...