The Letters of Alice James to Anne Ashburner, 1873-78: The Joy of Engagement (Part 1)

Abstract

Alice James, the only sister of William and Henry James, was born 7 August 1848 in New York City, was educated at home and abroad by governesses (and less formally by her father), attended school in Newport, and grew up in New York, Europe, Newport, Boston, and Cambridge.2 In Cambridge, after meeting elsewhere during the summer of 1869, Alice and Anne Ashburner (1846–1909), a neighbor two years her senior, became intimate friends and remained close for the rest of Alice’s life. Anne, usually called Annie, Nanny (frequently spelled Nannie), or Nancy, moved semi-permanently with her family to England in 1872, but the two friends corresponded throughout the decade, though the present collection contains nothing written after November 1878. The familiarity of the friendship is attested to on Alice James’s part not only by the correspondence, but also by the warm references to Anne Ashburner (Richards after her marriage in 1879) in her diary, by their efforts to see each other after Alice moved to England in 1884 (despite her situation as an invalid), and especially by the fact that Anne Ashburner was one of only four mourners requested by Alice James to attend her funeral services in March 1892. The James and Ashburner families lived within a few blocks of each other in Cambridge in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Samuel Ashburner (1816–?), a civil engineer and railroad official, was reared in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He married Annie Meade Barstow (1820–95), of a distinguished Salem family, in Boston on 21 August 1845. Nanny was born the following year in Boston and later moved with her family to Cambridge where, since 1860, Samuel Ashburner’s two maiden sisters—Anne (1807–94) and Grace (1814–93)—had lived on Kirkland Street with their wards, Arthur, Sara, and Theodora Sedgwick, the children of their dead sister, Sarah Ashburner Sedgwick. Kirkland Street was near Shady Hill, the home of Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), editor of the North American Review (1864–68), subsequently professor of art history at