What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

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My thanks to the following people who offered background, ideas, or editing help with the manuscript: Simeon Amon, Victoria Amon, Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Maria Esche, Michael Harris-Peyton, Peter Lynch, Neeti Madan, and Jean-Michel Rabaté.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my husband, Alan Penziner, and to my children, Sam and Kate Penziner, who provided useful comments and unfailing, if sometimes exasperated, support.

I wrote this book in order to bring to life historical characters and events that I have come to know through my reading. But as this is a work of fiction, imaginative material has necessarily been added and factual material altered to accommodate the plot.

London. 1888.

Henry James was drunk.

The room where he was dining looked familiar, but he could not place it. There was an oak sideboard, elaborately carved, and a cupboard containing a collection of fine porcelains. The plate was bone china, the silver heavy and apparently old. There was a landscape (was it Corot?) near the door, a set of prints (Rowlandson?) on the side wall, and a portrait by someone of talent over the mantel. It was a good house, though how good was a matter of whether the portrait was by van Dyck of an esteemed ancestor or by Sargent of a more contemporary personage (he was too bleary-eyed to look), and whether the silver had been passed down or purchased secondhand.

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