M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers, a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing times
Every Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King's College Cambridge, for what he once described as a 'dark seance', in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing of this fascinating, complex, troubled, difficult man. Monty James was widely recognized as perhaps the outstanding scholar of his generation, a man whose academic achievements were unparalleled, and who became the foremost living authority on medieval manuscripts, on stained glass, on Biblical apocrypha, and on the occult. He was also a formidable academic administrator, as Provost of King's College Cambridge and then as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, he led his institution through the difficult years of the First World War, in which many of his colleagues and students were killed. After the war, he returned to the sanctuary of his beloved Eton, which he served as Provost until his death.
James's life in Cambridge brought him into contact, and often into conflict, with many of the great figures and movements of his age, from Henry Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research to John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and the Bloomsbury Group, with which he had many connections. He was the friend of A. C. Benson, the teacher of Rupert Brooke. He was a repressed gay man, whose friends recognized this even where he did not. He was often troubled by modern ideas and tendencies, widening social access to universities, degrees for women. This is also a story of the profound consolations of scholarship, and of a man who found meaning on the wilder shores of human experience, in a world of demons and ghosts.
