But there was another side to his imagination that was drawn to the paranormal, the occult and the supernatural to events and situations outside the ordinary expectations of experience worlds of which the reality was called into question, and which perhaps exist only in the mind or in fiction. His chosen form of the novel also allows that expansiveness and capaciousness, the exploration of character and event developing over time, that intricacy and complexity of relationships which we find in novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Ambassadors (1903). James himself spoke of this quality (in a letter where he expressed a disinclination to ‘cherish’ the ghost story as a ‘ class of fiction’) as ‘a close connotation, or close observation, of the real – or whatever one may call it – the familiar, the inevitable’ ( Letters, Vol. By ‘realist’ is meant, broadly, that he takes recognisable characters who inhabit the world of his time and puts them in situations which have the plausibility (if often also the oddity) of actual historical occurrence. Henry James (1843–1916) is mainly remembered and read today as a great realist novelist, the analyst and explorer of English and American morals and manners, perhaps the subtlest of all commentators on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social scene. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, it is suggested that you may find it more useful to read the Introduction after you have read the book.

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GHOST STORIES Henry James Introduction and Notes by Martin Scofield University of Kent at CanterburyĨB East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJĪll rights reserved.

Ghost Stories by Henry James