SOURCE: "A Sense of the Past: Henry James and Vernon Lee," in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, Faber, 1977, pp. 111-23.

In the following excerpt, Briggs examines similarities between the fiction of Vernon Lee and Henry James.

When T. S. Eliot's Gerontion declared that he had no ghosts, he rejected his past, both personal and cultural, and his deliberate deracination was seen as one source of his barrenness. Although only too often ghosts may act as unpleasant reminders of actions preferably forgotten, by digging up long-buried corpses or reawakening tender consciences, total repression of the past or deliberate evasion of its consequences carry even greater penalties. One of these was dramatized by Dickens in his story The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848): here Redlaw, in consigning his unhappy memories to oblivion, forfeited his capacity for human compassion. In an era increasingly characterized...