M. R. James
1862–1936
Biography
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and died in 1936. He was an English medievalist who spent his scholarly life with old manuscripts and books, and he became provost of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1905 to 1918, then provost of Eton College until his death. He was also vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1913 to 1915.
He is remembered above all for his ghost stories. He first read them aloud at Christmas to friends and students at Eton and Cambridge, and they reached print in a series of collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), before being gathered into one volume in 1931. He changed the form by setting the supernatural in ordinary, realistic surroundings and by using a dry humour that offset the fear. His plots drew on his own learning about old objects, folklore and the rural landscapes of East Anglia, which is why critics call him the originator of the “antiquarian ghost story”. Many later writers and adapters still look back to him.
The catalogue holds Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the first of his collections and the volume that contains the stories that made his name. It is the natural place to start with him.
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Books
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
by M. R. James
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is a collection of ghost stories by British writer M. R. James, published in 1904 (some had previously appeared in magazines). Some later editions under this title contain both the original collection and its successor, More Ghost Stories of an…
Summary from Wikipedia: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (CC BY-SA 4.0)