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“But what does that mean? You need to play the game. I have a lot of respect for Minny. They are physical. They are competitive. Even when we were trailing, we knew that was not the end of it. We stayed with it and found a way.”

Chapter by chapter we learn that they, too, struggled to make sense of the seemingly senseless: the deaths, long before their time, of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 19-year-old wife; of Henry David Thoreau’s older brother, 27-year-old John; and of William James’s much-loved 24-year-old cousin, Minny.

That is why Richardson thinks Minny was uppermost in James’s mind when, a month after her death, he experienced what he described as an “acute neurasthenic attack” of “religious bearing” that caused “a horrible fear of my own existence.”

All these ideas, Richardson suggests, resulted from James’s attempts to free himself from the brooding thoughts and depression he had fallen into after Minny’s death.

After James’s young cousin Minny Temple died of tuberculosis in 1870, he felt “the nothingness of all our egotistical fury,” he wrote.