Alice Jamesthe LighthouseINFJ

In 1891, in London, a leading physician, Sir Andrew Clark, gave Alice James his verdict on the hard lump in her breast. It could not be cured. She was 42, and what she wrote about it in her diary has puzzled readers ever since. She was relieved.

To see why, you have to know the twenty years before.

She was born in New York on 7 August 1848, the only daughter in one of the most brilliant families in America. Her brothers were the philosopher William James and the novelist Henry James. She was as quick as either of them.

What she lacked was a body that would let her use that mind. From her late teens she was ill, on and off, for more than two decades: collapses, long months in bed, years lived as an invalid. No doctor ever found a cause anyone could point to, and without one, her suffering was easy to doubt.

Lighthouses know a version of this, even in good health. You see something clearly, and every authority in the room tells you it isn't there.

In 1889, at 40, living in England with her companion Katharine Peabody Loring, she began a diary. She hoped the habit of writing down her days might make her a little less lonely.

In company she was the patient, to be managed and pitied. On the page she was a mind: dry, funny, often merciless about the people around her, and nearly always right. Many Lighthouses live that way, with a composed self for the room and a truer one that comes out only on paper. Alice James made sure hers survived.

So when the verdict came, she wrote what few people would. Ever since she had been ill, she admitted, she had longed for a disease that could be touched and named, however dreadful. Now she had one.

The formless vague was twenty years of being doubted. The sustaining concrete was a fact that anyone could put a hand on. Whatever else she felt, she was no longer alone with something nobody else could see.

Even then she kept her wit. The hard lump in her breast, she wrote, had become the soil in which Katharine's genius for friendship and devotion could flower.

She died in London on 6 March 1892, at 43. Katharine kept the diary. Henry, reading it, was alarmed by its frankness and full of admiration for the mind in it. A full edition, The Diary of Alice James, appeared in 1964, and it is still read, often by people who know what it is to live in a body no one believes.

For twenty years other people decided what her suffering meant. In the diary, she decided. That is the account that lasted.