ABSTRACT
Montague Rhodes James distinguished careers in three distinct but interlinked fields. James is an enormously popular writer. The Collected Ghost Stories has never been out of print. He also enjoys a very high critical reputation, a cornerstone of most scholarly studies of the ghost story. Christopher Lee’s performances were part of a conscious attempt to replicate the first occasions for reading many of James’s earlier stories. In many ways, James establishes—or at least solidifies—the template for the twentieth-century ghost story. The classic ghost story tends to be aesthetically spare, straitened, narrow, austere; and it tends to be backward looking, hearkening back to or attempting to recreate a fundamentally Victorian sensibility. While James was of course interested in the ghost story as a literary form—he was a lifelong admirer of Dickens and Le Fanu, in particular—he seems to have had no real interest in, or position on, the veracity of the supernatural.
