1843–1916
In 1879, in his mid-thirties, Henry James scribbled in his notebook an idea for a story: “A young girl, unknown to herself, is followed, constantly, by a figure which other persons see. She is perfectly unconscious of it—but there is a fear that she may cease to be so.”
He went on to sketch possible narrative developments, but they didn’t grow into a story for several years. “Sir Edmund Orme” first appeared in the Christmas 1891 issue of Black and White (“A Weekly Illustrated Record and Review”), a periodical founded a few months earlier. During the next eleven years, before it merged with the heavily illustrated weekly the Sphere—which competed with the Illustrated London News and other periodicals to feed the public’s growing appetite for images—Black and White published authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Nesbit, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1892 James included “Sir Edmund Orme” in his collection The Lesson of the Master and Other Tales. For the twenty-four-volume “New York Edition” of his works, published between 1907 and 1909, James revised the story somewhat, but his original version appears here.
It was the fifth of his published ghost stories, but it had been a decade and a half since its predecessor, “The Ghostly Rental.” As one would expect of such a tireless proponent of l’art pour l’art, James was uneasy about being classed among spookmongers, however noble their lineage. His first ghost story, published in 1868, bore the deliberately anti-Gothic title “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” Although wary of the genre’s stereotypical machinery, he wrote numerous ghost stories. In the spring of 1890 the versatile and prolific British writer Violet Paget, who wrote fine stories under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, sent James her new collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories. He read it and replied, complimenting Paget on her artistry but unable to resist confessing, “The supernatural story, the subject wrought in fantasy, is not the class of fiction I myself most cherish (prejudiced as you may have perceived me in favour of a close connotation, or close observation, of the real—or whatever one may call it—the familiar, the inevitable).”
Although mostly celebrated for hefty novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove, James wrote more than a hundred stories and especially enjoyed writing what he called “the beautiful and blest nouvelle.” It was in this form—the long story or brief novel, usually described in English with the Italian word novella—that James created some of his best-known works. Despite his disclaimer, many have a supernatural theme. These include his now legendary “The Turn of the Screw,” which James later described to H. G. Wells, amid embarrassed complaints that he might have tainted his hard-won reputation with vulgar supernaturalism, as “essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d’esprit”—although he carefully wrote it to work just as well as a tale of self-deluding psychological trauma.
In contrast to many other practitioners, James conjured his spirits in daylight, amid ordinary everyday life. “Henry James has only to make the smallest of steps and he is over the border,” observed Virginia Woolf, with her usual perception and elegance. “His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body.” She maintained that his specters “have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.”
And there’s another way that James’s ghosts and his characters’ response to them differs from the norm: rather than being horrified by his glimpse of a spirit, the narrator feels grateful that he has been vouchsafed such a vision.