Detailed view for the Book: Alice in Bed (Play)

Title:

Alice in Bed (Play)
 

Authors:

Genres:

Theatrical

Editions:

# Date Publisher Binding Cover
1 1993-00-00 Farrar, Straus & Giroux  

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Blurb: 
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.