Is Alice James an outsider artist?

In a rare detour from my reading of literary fiction, we're reading Jean Strouse's Alice James biography for book group - impressive piece of scholarship, but pretty dense material so far. First couple of chapters very carefully place AJ w/in her family context; the James family is familiar ground to me - having read some HJames bios (not Edel). The driving question behind Strouse's bio is: Is Alice James a great (or even good) writer overlooked in her own time? And a secondary question: If so, why? It seems she was unpublished in her lifetime and, if she is to be considered a writer, it's not on the basis of any work crafted for publication but on her "letters," that is, her diary and communications. What Strouse quotes in the early chapters is pretty impressive, but to me there's a huge distinction between a few sharp passages of observation and a sustained literary work. But let's assume she has stature on her own, and not solely because of her family association: what then? Why is she in the shadows of her famous bros.? Strouse quotes the famous Virginia Woolf passage from A Room of One's Own pondering: What if Shakespeare had a sister? And VW imagines S's sister as writing in secret, burning her manuscripts, running away to London, attaching herself to a theater ... it's all quite plausible, actually. There were virtually no opportunities for women writers in the 1600s. But it's a bit different in the mid-1800s obviously. There are two poles in opposition throughout the early chapters of this bio: on the one hand, it's absolutely clear that the paterfamilias, Henry James Sr., had much lower expectations for women (i.e., his only daughter) than for men (4 sons), so Alice clearly lived in a household that did not expect her to make a career as a writer. On the other hand ... as a child of the James household, which was completely devoted to literature, ideas, reading, travel, improving the mind and spirit, where the drop-in guests were folks like Emerson - she had an upbringing far, far more nurturing of any spirit or talent within her than almost any other background. One has to think that if she had the talent and drive and capacity to write she would have done so, and would have been encouraged to do so - and that if her work were of any great interest she'd be widely read today, perhaps as an "outsider artist." Also, that her failure to do so did not lower her in her parents' eyes: two of the brothers, after all, had no literary or philosophical bent. And her father was an earnest writer but dense and dull writer himself; the funniest line in the book so far is someone's [William Dean Howells's] succinct critique of Henry Sr's book The Secret of Swedenborg, to wit: "He kept it."