Alice James was an American diarist. She taught history for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home from 1873–1876. James suffered from psychological and physical problems throughout her life, and she never married. Instead, she found companionship through her four older brothers and her friends.
In her diaries, James revealed that she was both suicidal and patricidal. She first starting keeping her diary in 1889, at age 40, and it was not publicly published in full until 1964 due to its contents. She described her hysteria as a fight between her body and her mind. Her brother William encouraged her to indulge in opium or morphia if it would reduce her pain. At age 43, she died of breast cancer.
Information from Alice James Books and supplemented by Wikipedia.