The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James

These seventeen sensitive, subtle ghostly stories, including the unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, represent the sum total of Henry James's supernaturalist fiction, and confirm his position as one of the foremost exponents of the 'psychological' tale. Dating from as early as the 1870s into the first years of the twentieth century, James's stories were a major influence on later British writers in the genre, particularly Walter de la Mare and L.P. Hartley.

As Glen Cavaliero points out in his new Introduction, James, in his 'highly idiosyncratic and mercilessly precise' prose fashions 'a number of differing portrayals of how psychic agencies control the behaviour and the private dramas of people who move within an implacable but unseen moral universe. In these stories that universe is made known through the operative presence of the past.' The Sense of the Past can be seen as 'his most ambitious attempt to describe the relationship between past and present'.

In the best-known of these stories, the masterly 'The Turn of the Screw', Henry James perfectly realises his method, wherein the ghostly presences rely almost entirely upon the credibility of the person witnessing them. In other stories they are invisible or conjured up by intuition or extra-sensory perception or, as in 'The Private Life', manifest themselves in an altogether more playful form. The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James will acquaint aficionados of supernaturalist fiction with a major contribution to the genre by one of the giants of English literature.

Contents:

• Introduction by Glen Cavaliero
• The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
• De Grey: A Romance
• The Last of the Valerii
• The Ghostly Rental
• Sir Edmund Orme
• The Private Life
• Owen Wingrave
• The Altar of the Dead
• The Friends of the Friends
• The Turn of the Screw
• The Real Right Thing
• The Great Good Place
• Maud-Evelyn
• The Third Person
• The Beast in the Jungle
• The Jolly Corner
• The Sense of the Past
• Notes for The Sense of the Past