About the Book
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 séance', 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.
Table of Contents:
Abbreviations Cast of Characters Preface Acknowledgements 1: Port Royal, Jamaica, 1655 2: Temple Grove, 1873 3: Eton, 1876 4: King's, 1882 5: Fellow of King's, 1887 6: Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1893 7: Provost of King's, 1905 8: Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, 1913 9: Provost of Eton, 1918 10: Order of Merit, 1930 11: Nunc dimittis, Provost's Lodge, Eton, 12 June 1936
About the Author :
Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and numerous articles, mostly on nineteenth-century literature and popular literature. In 2011, he edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories. He is the General Editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, for which series he edited The Hound of the
Baskervilles.
Review :
Deeply researched, always engaging, occasionally contentious - Darryl Jones's life of M R James is the fullest, frankest account yet written of this curious, reticent, funny man, and the worlds that he inhabited and imagined. A fine companion to the peerless ghost stories.
For the Dead Remember is an achievement of scholarship and storytelling worth celebrating. Not only does it bring to life one of the greatest supernatural writers of all time, a man shielded from both others and himself, but also the lost world through which he moved, and does so in a manner that is witty, generous, and ultimately moving. As an evocation of M. R. James and his circle, and a reminder of the dark glory of his tales, it is unlikely ever to be bettered.
Comprehensive, erudite and insightful; this is the definitive biography of M.R. James.
This is a wonderful and fascinating biography, partly because M. R. James is such an extraordinary combination of public fame and personal enigma, and partly because Daryl Jones is such a great guide to his life and to the era. M. R. James was both ghost story supremo and conservative educationalist, an academic star and an anti-intellectual, misogynist and gay best friend: Daryl Jones explores these paradoxes with deep sensitivity and beguiling flair
An original and vivid account of the Victorian academic gentleman's world, with male friendship, rigid adherence to tradition, and devout institutionalism at its core. Jones's storytelling is so compelling that the book is hard to set down, even as its deep research enables the spirit of the age to shine through the lives of James and his contemporaries.
