“Madam, Will You Talk?”: Disability, Confinement, and a Newly Discovered Draft of a Ghost Story by M.R. James

Despite his considerable importance as a scholar, the medievalist and college head Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) is best remembered today as the author of some of the most influential and highly-regarded ghost stories ever written. The discovery of a previously-unnoticed holograph manuscript of a precursor of one of these stories, "Martin's Close", allows for a reassessment of its unusual narrative strategies, in particular in regard to its gothic representation of a woman with an intellectual disability and her restless ghost. This representation, it is argued, is best considered in the light of a very particular historical moment when the perceived threat of the "feeble-minded" to British society was the prominent subject of public discussion and debate, a conversation with long-lasting implications for those to be affected by resultant acts of institutionalisation and involuntary detention—policies shaped by men of James's own elite intellectual and academic circles, the very audience, in fact, for whom he first read and performed his famous tales.