Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes - Hardcover

Sontag, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374102732 ISBN 13: 9780374102739

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993

Synopsis

Dramatizes the plight of Alice James, who was confined to a bed by illness and whose genius was confined by nineteenth century conventions and expectations

About this title

Review

"Oddly eloquent."
--Bruce Weber, "The New York Times" "The dialog is terse and the action tense in this trenchant tale of imagination and feminine anger and grief.... Recommended for all drama and literature collections."
--"Library Journal"

Oddly eloquent.

The dialog is terse and the action tense in this trenchant tale of imagination and feminine anger and grief.... Recommended for all drama and literature collections.

Oddly eloquent.--Bruce Weber "The New York Times "

Oddly eloquent. Bruce Weber, "The New York Times"

The dialog is terse and the action tense in this trenchant tale of imagination and feminine anger and grief.... Recommended for all drama and literature collections. "Library Journal""

"Oddly eloquent." --Bruce Weber, The New York Times

"The dialog is terse and the action tense in this trenchant tale of imagination and feminine anger and grief.... Recommended for all drama and literature collections." --Library Journal

From the Back Cover

Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy based on the life of Alice James (1848-92), the brilliant sister of William and Henry James. The waters of depression closed over Alice James when she was nineteen; she tried to summon the courage to commit suicide, she suffered from a variety of vague and debilitating ailments, she went abroad, she stayed in bed, she kept a diary, and she died... at age forty-three. In Susan Sontag's play, Alice James merges imaginatively with the other great Alice of her period, the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A tea party is convened where Alice is counseled by Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller and by two exemplary angry women from the nineteenth-century stage: Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis (from Giselle), and Kundry (from Wagner's Parsifal), the guilt-ridden woman who wants to sleep. Alice in Bed is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women, about mental traveling, about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination. It is a powerful and memorable addition to Susan Sontag's achievement as a writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0374102732
• ISBN 13: 9780374102739
• Binding: Hardcover