‘The Jolly Corner’ teaches us how to read James. I take it out of chronological order as a matrix of themes and a structural model. It epitomises late James. Published in 1908, it is a subtly reflexive story, a paradigm in more ways than one.

It is a ghost story in which fantasy reveals the terrifying and pitiable ghosts we all see, as present is haunted by past, actuality by possibility, has-been by might-have-been. There are two famous examples of a romantic version of this fantasy, Charles Lamb's brilliantly pathetic ‘Dream Children’, in which the childless bachelor imagines beloved issue, and James Barrie's Dear Brutus, in which an unborn child sighs that she does not want to be a might-have-been. Lamb's pathos is successful, his ghosts particularized to articulate the gain and loss of imagined intimacy. Even in Barrie's soft romance there is the sheer interest of the idea, the tugging strength of myth beneath sentimentality.

James's ghost is highly individualized, like Lamb's dream children, and his specificity engages sympathy for haunter as well as haunted. Unlike Lamb's rapt little listeners, Spencer Brydon's might-have-been or other self is an unwanted, threatening, and dreaded revenant, though he becomes sympathetic in the end, in a way. We feel for ghost as well as ghost-seer, because we feel for a whole person, a person whole enough to imagine his own alternative history. Like most of James's protagonists, Brydon has to be remade, and for him, as for Strether in The Ambassadors, remaking involves imagining what he might have been in other circumstances, seeing, if not accepting, his potential greed, corruption, violence, and suffering. But it is not a simple fable of moral division, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Gray. Brydon's ghost has to be understood as vulnerable as well as powerful, human as well as monstrous, familiar as well as strange.

This story is a fable of the split psyche, historical determinacy, and creativity. Its genre, narration, and image-making are reflexive. It is necessary to the story's point that the ghost is raised – and is seen to be raised – by the ghost-seer. The fantasy is facilitated at the beginning by the hero's act of imagination, an act which is psychological and political: the ghost of a man who has never lived is raised to demonstrate the social construction of character.