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An Unknown Woman, by Alice Koller (1981)

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“When a woman asks to be alone,” Jessamyn West wrote in Hide and Seek, “… alone, alone, truly alone … a woman feels wicked, unloving, defying God and man alike.” If this is true, then Alice Koller could be considered America’s wickedest woman. Since the day in October 1962 when she packed her few belongings and a German Shepherd puppy named Logos into her car and set out for Nantucket Island, she has pursued, nurtured, relished, contemplated, and celebrated solitude to an extent no writer of our time could match.

An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery is her account of the three months she spent in a rented summer house out by the shore, walking along the beach, reflecting on her life, and trying to achieve some understanding of the most fundamental questions any human can ask of herself: Who am I? What am I here for? What do I want from my life?

At the time she decided to take the few hundred dollars she had in the world and head someplace remote, isolated (and cheap), Koller had already been struggling to exist for almost twenty years. After finishing high school in Ohio, she accepted a chance to act and study as part of the acting company based at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. She soon grew disenchanted with acting, though, and began attending the University of Chicago. At a time when few women were going into graduate schools, she determined to carry on with her studies. Relying on countless low-paying clerical jobs, she eventually worked her way through to earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Radcliffe (now merged into Harvard) in 1959, at the age of 34.

She quickly discovered, however, that her doctorate meant little in an academic world still overwhelmingly dominated by men. When she asked one of her professors for advice on getting a job, he dismissed her with a curt reply: “You’re too late,” which likely referred more to her age than the time in the academic year. And so, after thirteen years of study, she found herself taking the same kind of low-paid work as she had as an undergrad. To add to her woes, she’d watched her second long-term serious romantic relationship end with the man abruptly leaving to marry another woman.

“I don’t have a life,” she concludes, looking at herself in the mirror. “I don’t live anywhere. I perch.” “It has to stop,” she decides. “Can’t I just stop, right now, and try to figure out what I’m doing? What I should be doing?” And so, after a little hunting, she finds a house outside Siasconset on Nantucket Island she can afford to rent for at least three months (due to the off-season). She also decides she needs a dog “To warn me about strangers,” and buys a puppy she names Logos in tribute to the philosophy she has spent the last decade studying: “Logos: the rational principle of the universe, the Word, reasoned discourse.”

On her very first day in the house on Nantucket, her search for answers begins with a very practical question (albeit a question few men in the same situation would ever ask): “What will I look like now that no one I know will see me?” And yet her answer (“Color will matter”) starts Koller on her way. “It’s my first clear judgment, my judgment. A very tiny step I take. How will knowing that I trust my eye for color take me to knowing how I want to live my life? The chasm stretches beneath me.”

It would be easy to dismiss An Unknown Woman as the epitome of navel-gazing. A week into her stay, she writes:

Wanting. What have I wanted? No. What have I wanted? Not right yet. What have I wanted?

When I read this, I immediately thought of the Beyond the Fringe sketch parodying the recollections of Bertrand Russell and the absurdity of logic as a philosophical discipline. Russell recounts a visit to his fellow philosopher, G. E. Moore:

… there was Moore seated by the fire with a basket upon his knees.

“Moore,” I said, “do you have any apples in that basket?”

“No,” he replied, and smiled seraphically, as was his wont.

I decided to try a different logical tack. “Moore,” I said, “do you then have some apples in that basket?”

“No,” he replied, leaving me in a logical cleft stick from which I had but one way out.

“Moore,” I said, “do you then have apples in that basket?”

“Yes,” he replied. And from that day forth, we remained the very closest of friends.

All jesting aside, though, there is a great difference between playing with semantics about a basket of apples and digging into the root of your own identity. Koller calls the thinking she is doing “a kind of fighting”: “I’m defending, and laying siege, all at once.” “I’m even the prize,” she jokes, “But I’m also the only one who’d want it.”

Inevitably (perhaps), excavation of one’s identity reaches the strata of one’s family and childhood. In Koller’s case, it leads to the realization that what she has been pursuing for much of her life is the approval of a mother who gave her little attention and even less love growing up: “She’s been an obstacle to be gotten around in everything I do, everything I’ve ever done.”

From this discovery, she begins to assemble a sense of self owing to no one else’s choices but her own. She starts a list of moments in recent memory that have given her as much of a “sense of fullness” as sitting with Logos’ head in her lap, scratching behind his ears, and eliciting a low moan of satisfaction. In four hours, she comes up with thirty moments. And from this list, she develops an understanding of what she truly seeks from life: “What I’ll want to do will have to have this same quality of … what? Fitting me.”

And so she sets out for her new life. After three months, she is not broke, thanks to a bit of work she landed analyzing a technical report for some research firm in Connecticut, but close to it. She has no firm job prospect and will have to camp out once again in some friend’s house. “And yet I know some few things,” she concludes. “I love Logos. I must have him with me.” And “This ocean matters to me.” With these things and “the idea that other things may join with these,” she heads back to the mainland. “They are all the self I have. But they are mine.”

It would be pleasant to think that this new foundation enabled Koller to launch herself into great personal and professional success, but the truth is that it more likely condemned her to a life on the margins of society. She turned the journal she had kept on the island into a book, but it was rejected by thirty different publishers over the course of thirteen years, most often for being “too personal,” until it found a receptive editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. The book became something of a grass-roots best-seller and was reissued several times in paperback.

In 1991, Koller followed up with The Stations of Solitude (1990), which reviewed her experience on Nantucket in light of her life and thoughts since leaving the island. She had a brief stint teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara, but no long-term teaching jobs. As Diane M. Quilty Litchfield put it in her Masters thesis on Koller’s work, “One Woman’s Construction of Self and Meaning: A qualitative study of the life of Alice Koller” (link), “Indeed, her employment was so sporadic that she often lived through the generosity of her friends or on welfare.” Or, as Koller herself wrote, “During … twenty-five years, I have moved sixteen times … I forage for my living where the food supply is.”

And yet, Koller resolutely embraces and champions her choice to pursue a life driven more by introspection than material comforts: “I essay to write my thinking. I am a philosopher studying my own mind. And when I look outward at the natural world, I essay to write my seeing and hearing and touching.”

In 2008, at the age of 83, Alice Koller bought her own domain name and set up her own website, alicekoller.com, on which she solicits “patrons” for a work in progress titled “Meditation on Being a Philosopher.” It appears that she’s been renewing her domain name registration annually since then. It’s up for renewal again in a few weeks, so I’ll have to check if she’s still keeping it going … a few months short of her 90th birthday.

Whether “Meditations” gets finished or not, Alice Koller has been our closest counterpart to Henry David Thoreau — indeed, has devoted more years to the principle that only an examined life truly matters than Thoreau drew breath. And for that, in my view, she deserves to be celebrated as an American original.


An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery, by Alice Koller
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981

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28 thoughts on “An Unknown Woman, by Alice Koller (1981)”

  1. So wish for an update. Alice changed lives of women like me. Her writings continue to reach out with depth and connection, a profound paradox given her titles and themes

  2. I credit the internal dialogue and introspection of Alice Koller in The Unknown Woman with shaping my own peaceful life over the years. I wanted to thank her.

  3. I tried contacting him via GoFundMe. Robert Stofac appears to be real, a retired ophthalmologist in Colorado, but the fact that no one has contributed in over four months puts the situation in some doubt. I’ll let you know if he responds.

  4. I contacted Robert Stofac , the GoFund me gentleman , by messenger on FB…I never heard back. About a month or more ago..

  5. It would bring me closure to know if Alice is still alive…different info on this page as to this. I knew her in the 90’s in California, we corresponded briefly. I have prayed for her since as I wanted so much to see her accept the Lord before she passed. People, Jewish or otherwise can accept the Lord even on their deathbed and have eternal life. When we corresponded, Alice was not interested in this. There are many ministries that teach on the Messiah since those days…one being Discovering the Jewish Jesus out of Michigan. Please someone let me know if the is alive still..

  6. So glad the universe brought me to this site today, as Alice unknowingly has given me so much through her writings. She helped me learn how to question myself, to find my own undistracted places, to value a contemplative life, and ultimately to write what I know. I do hope Alice has been happily satisfied with her life–and that you all have as well!

  7. I haven’t heard anything about her death, but I hope someone watching here will let us know. There are many who have been moved by her books and would want to know.

  8. Awake in the middle of the night. I have taken up reading The Stations of Solitude , again. It is a mainstay.
    I wondered about her ever since reading An Unknown Woman.
    I have heard that she died. She is the dearest and best writer I have ever known.

  9. I found this page after Googling Alice Koller on a whim. I first heard An Unknown Woman when Edward Merritt read the manuscript on WAMU in the 1970s, when I was a teen. I remember sitting in the kitchen on winter afternoons, listening, and being intrigued but probably not understanding a good deal of it. When I was in my 30s, a friend gave me a copy of the book not knowing that I knew it already. Now I’m curious to read her second book.

    I hope she has had a decent life. She was a terrific writer.

  10. I am glad to have found this web page. I read her book in 1993. She resonated with me because of my family background and the fact of being alone. Then, I found her book when I had moved to Tennessee (I lived in Wisconsin when I read her book) I was walking the library Isles and I came across her book again! I reread it and realized how her family life was so similar to mine and it felt I had missed that portion of the book. Possibly because it is so hard to admit to pain in your life at times when grew up disassociated with everything. I was glad to read it again but I’ve been forgot the name of the book again.

    I’m happy to say I remembered who book because I thought it was something about an invisible woman and I looked up the synonyms of invisible and found unknown.

    I wish her well and hope that she has loved ones around her. She had a rough road to go and I have traveled the same and I’m not out of it yet. But I’m going to keep going…

  11. Me Unanswered
    So much to say to ask. Reading quote by Alice, “Perhaps loving something is the only starting place there is for making your life your own.” Thank you Alice. May there be answers you have found that filled you with satisfaction & happy jaunts.

  12. Indeed, I have noticed someone named Bill keeps posting and appears to know her (and I would like to thank him for the update)! I just wonder if all those pictures mentioned in “The Stations of Solitude” have survived. I do not know her personally, but there is something about her books that make you wish you did. As a woman living on her own, everything just resonates with me. It would be a shame if all of her pictures and unpublished writings were to be destroyed after her passing away. I like to think someone out there will preserve all of them (as it keeps her “alive” in a sense).

  13. This seems to be the only place with credible updates on Alice. I always wonder if she’s still alive whenever I read her books (and everytime I wonder if any pictures of Logos, Kairos and Ousia survived). Her books had such an impact on me. I hope she is still out there and doing well at the time of this comment.

  14. I’m not in contact with Alice Koller, but I hope that someone who is will see this and pass the sad news along. Thank you for sharing and my thoughts for your family.

  15. I would like to tell Alice Koller that her brother, my father-in-law Kenn Koller passed away in June 2018. He was a wonderful man that had made many positive changes in his long life. He was a good father in his later years to my husband Charles Koller. He was also a wonderful grandfather to our 5 children. He always wanted to reconnect with his sister before he died. I am sorry he did not. His memory is a blessing.

  16. By chance, I found her first book ten years ago & as I read it, it was falling apart. So once finished, I kept all my favorite pages & pull them out to resd from time to time.

  17. sorry, but Alice was born in 1925. That means she is now 93 years old. Do you think we mean the same? The writer who wrote from her trip to Nantucket with her dog Logos? Is she still alive?

  18. Alice Koller was found lost in Upper Freehold NJ by a friend of mine who was out walking. Alice was out paying one of her bills. She had no idea where she was. My friend took her to Allentown PD and finally took her home. She wasn’t sure where she lived. Neighbors told my friend that Alice had no one. She was reported to be very thin.

  19. Alice is alive and well. I won’t comment on where she lives as she still chooses to remain very private. She is a wonderful woman who functions on her own on a daily basis. It is my pleasure to have met her and look forward to many years with her.

  20. Wish it were so, but I doubt that website is actually Alice Koller’s rather than someone trying to capitalize on her name.

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