'A very pleasant man, he is,' was Monty's verdict, 'talking just as he writes, with punctilious effort to use exactly the word he wants: looks like a respectable butler.' In Rye they met Henry James, a friend of Lubbock's. 'The following month, August, was in Kent, bicycling with Percy Lubbock. Interestingly enough, our two very different Jameses did actually once meet: The volume also includes James's great novella 'The Turn of the Screw', perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love and 'The Private Life', which finds high comedy in its ghostly theme. The stories range widely in tone and type. This edition includes all ten of his 'apparitional' stories, or ghost stories in the strict sense of the term, and as such is the fullest collection currently available.

His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. The blurb to Schofield's collection claims that: The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)Īs you'll observe, the stories are heavily weighted towards the latter end of James's career, after the traumatic failure of his theatrical ambitions (culminating in the horrific first night of his play Guy Domville (1995), when he was literally booed from the stage).Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2001. The other masterly works here include 'The Jolly Corner', 'Owen Wingrave' and further tales of visitations, premonitions, madness, grief and family secrets, where the living are just as mysterious and unknowable as the dead.Ghost Stories of Henry James. This new collection brings together eight of James's tales exploring the uncanny, including his infamous ghost story, 'The Turn of the Screw', a work saturated with evil, in which a fraught governess becomes convinced that malicious spirits are menacing the children in her care. 'I see ghosts everywhere', wrote Henry James, who retained a fascination with the supernatural and sensational throughout his writing career. 'There had been a moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep'

An unsettling new collection of Henry James's best short stories exploring ghosts and the uncanny

Ghost stories by henry james