SOURCE: "Sisterhood and Self-Censorship in the Nineteenth Century," in The Uses of Autobiography, edited by Julia Swindells, Taylor & Francis, 1995, pp. 110-27.

In the essay below, Bottoms discusses Alice James's attempts to come to terms with life and express herself through her diary.

Diary writing is sometimes perceived as a private and spontaneous activity; unstructured, uninhibited, it flows on from day to day, a modest little stream of consciousness. In reality it is very far from this, though the writer may not be fully conscious of the process of selection and structuring which is taking place. When Alice James—sister of Henry, the novelist, and William, the author of Principles of Psychology—began her journal she was 40 years old, an invalid and alone, apart from her nurse, having moved to England a few years earlier for what had been intended to be a short visit. Like many other diary...