Henry James wrote around twenty ghost stories, which is not something most people know about the author of The Portrait of a Lady.
He is filed as the great novelist of consciousness, of Americans in Europe, of enormously long sentences in which nothing happens for pages and then something devastating happens in a subordinate clause. All of that is true. He also spent forty years returning to the supernatural, and one of those returns produced the most argued-about horror story in the language.
This is a guide to the Henry James books for horror readers, so it covers the ghostly fiction rather than the major novels. If you want The Ambassadors, there are better pages for it than this one.
One thing worth knowing before you start, because it explains why the ambiguity in his work is informed rather than coy. His brother was William James, the psychologist, who served as president of the Society for Psychical Research and took the investigation of apparitions seriously as a scientific problem. Their father had a religious crisis he called a vastation and became a Swedenborgian. The Jameses argued about the reality of the supernatural at the dinner table for decades, which is not the background of a writer being evasive for effect.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Essential One
One of the Henry James books is a permanent fixture on every horror list ever compiled, and it is a hundred pages long.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The post is at Bly, a remote house, two orphaned children in her charge, and the guardian who hires the young governess attaches one condition: no letters, no appeals, no contact with him, no matter what occurs.
In time she grows certain of visitations: Peter Quint, the valet, dead; Miss Jessel, her own predecessor, dead; a pair who corrupted the children in life, in her reading, and haven’t finished.
James engineered a permanent tie: either Bly has ghosts, or Bly has a governess whose certainty does the damage, and not one sentence in the text breaks the deadlock. More than a hundred years of criticism hasn’t broken it from outside either.
What keeps the ambiguity standing is her own intelligence: she raises the madness question against herself, gives it a fair hearing, and rules it out on the page.
Her circumstances complete the machine: a young woman without money, hired help, cut off, barred from appealing upward, and carrying a passion for an employer she saw one time.
The frame is a manuscript read aloud at a Christmas party.
More on ghost books and psychological horror books.
The Other Ghost Stories
The Henry James ghost stories nobody reads, and the interesting thing about them is that the apparitions are almost always doing moral work rather than threatening anybody. Most of those are collected in the above edition by Wordsworth, which is the most complete single-volume collection of James’s ghost fiction.
The Jolly Corner (1908)
The best of them after The Turn of the Screw, and the one horror readers consistently underrate because nobody tells them it exists.
Spencer Brydon returns to New York after thirty-three years in Europe to deal with the family property, and becomes obsessed with the question of who he would have become if he had stayed. He begins stalking the empty house at night, hunting the version of himself that took the other path. And the house is not empty.
The confrontation, when it comes, is genuinely frightening, and the thing he meets is horrifying in a specific way: not monstrous, but mutilated by a life of money and success. It’s a doppelgänger story about regret, and nothing James wrote in the mode speaks more directly.
Owen Wingrave (1892)
Owen is the last of a military family and he has decided he will not go into the army, which nobody in the household is prepared to accept.
His grandfather threatens disinheritance. His tutor is embarrassed. Then, his fiancée Kate is contemptuous and tells him he is a coward, and eventually dares him to prove he is not by spending a night in the room where a Wingrave ancestor killed his own son for refusing to fight, and died himself the same night in the same room.
He does it.
The ghost is barely present and the story does not need it, because the family is doing the haunting. James is writing about a young man being destroyed by an inherited obligation he never agreed to, and about a woman who despises him for having a mind of his own.
Britten’s 1971 opera, commissioned for television, remains the most performed of the Jamesian adaptations.
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
A man courting a young woman in Brighton discovers that her mother can see a ghost, that he can see it too, and that the girl herself cannot.
Sir Edmund Orme was engaged to the mother years ago and she broke it off badly and he killed himself, and he now appears whenever the daughter is being courted.
The mechanism is the interesting part. The ghost is not threatening anybody. It appears to the mother as a permanent reproach, and it appears to the suitor as a warning about what the family does, and it will only become visible to the daughter at the moment she is capable of the same cruelty.
That construction is genuinely elegant, and no story shows more purely how James used an apparition as a moral instrument rather than a threat.
It’s early, it’s short, and of all his ghost stories it satisfies most conventionally.
The Friends of the Friends (1896)
A woman is engaged to a man, and she has a friend, and both of them have had the same uncanny experience: each saw a parent at the moment of that parent’s death, elsewhere.
She spends years trying to introduce them, on the grounds that two people who have had that experience ought to meet, and something always prevents it. Appointments fail. One is ill, the other is delayed.
Then the friend dies.
And the fiancé says he met her, that evening, at his rooms, and that she said nothing and stayed twenty minutes.
The narrator’s response is the story. She becomes convinced the meeting happened after the death, that the two of them are now conducting something she cannot see, and she breaks the engagement.
James leaves entirely open whether anything supernatural occurred or whether a jealous woman destroyed her own marriage over a coincidence about times of death.
The Ghostly Rental (1876) and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
The two early ones, written before he was famous, and both are considerably more conventional than the late work.
“The Ghostly Rental” has a divinity student in Massachusetts who becomes curious about an abandoned house, and an old military man who visits it every quarter to collect rent from a ghost. The explanation is not supernatural and the last twist is, and James constructed it as a straightforward magazine piece.
“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” is his nastiest. Two sisters in colonial Massachusetts, one marries the man both want, dies young, and makes her husband promise the wardrobe of clothes she brought will go to her daughter. The surviving sister marries him and eventually asks for the key.
The final image, of what is found when the chest is opened, is unusually explicit for James and it is genuinely shocking.
Both are free and both are worth twenty minutes.
The Altar of the Dead (1895)
The one not contained in the above edition, but you can read it for free online.
George Stransom’s fiancée died on the eve of their wedding many years ago, and he has organized his whole life around remembering her and everybody else he has lost.
He rents a side chapel in a London church and installs candles, one for each of his dead, and tends them, and the arrangement gives him something close to peace.
Then he meets a woman who also visits the altar, and they become friends over years, and he eventually discovers she is mourning one particular man, and that the man is the one person Stransom has deliberately excluded from his candles because he wronged him.
There is no ghost anywhere in it. It is on this page because the dead are more present to Stransom than anybody living, and because James is writing about a man who has made a religion out of grief and does not understand that it is also a method of refusing to forgive.
The last scene is one of the best things he wrote.
The One That Isn’t Supernatural
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
John Marcher believes something extraordinary and terrible is waiting for him, some fate that will define his life, and he has been waiting since he was young. He tells May Bartram about it, once, when they are both young, and she spends the next thirty years waiting with him. She does not marry. He does not marry her. The decades go.
There is no beast and no supernatural content whatsoever, and it belongs on a horror page anyway, because what Marcher eventually understands is a more complete annihilation than anything in the ghost stories.
It’s about fifty pages and it is one of the great pieces of American fiction, and the Henry James book I’d hand to a skeptic. If you want to know why James is considered what he’s considered, read this rather than a nine-hundred-page novel.
You can find it for free online or contained in the above collection by Penguin Classics.
Which Edition to Buy
The ghost stories are scattered across his collected short fiction, so a dedicated volume is worth having.
The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories in Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics collects the major supernatural work in one place, including “The Jolly Corner”, “Owen Wingrave” and “Sir Edmund Orme”.
Leon Edel’s older collection The Ghostly Tales of Henry James is the completist option and gathers eighteen of them.
Everything is public domain, so all of it is available free if you’d rather not buy.
Where to Start
Read The Turn of the Screw, and give it fifty pages before you decide about the sentences.
If it works, read “The Jolly Corner” next, which is shorter, more frightening in the conventional sense, and almost nobody recommends it.
If the prose defeats you, try “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” instead, which is early, brief and considerably more direct.
And read The Beast in the Jungle at some point regardless of whether you care about ghosts.
A note on support: this page mentions suicide. If you’re struggling, you don’t have to handle it alone. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Elsewhere, the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centers at iasp.info.
Everything else worth reading is on my best horror books list. The form he refined is on my ghost books list.
