De Grey: A Romance

De Grey, A Romance is an early short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1868. It belongs to the very earliest stage of his published work, when he was in his mid twenties and still experimenting with the kinds of subject and tone that would become his mature manner.

The story is one of his early supernatural or quasi supernatural tales. The De Grey family of the title carries an old curse. Every man in the family is doomed to love and to bring about the death of the woman he chooses. Paul De Grey, the latest of the line, has been raised in ignorance of the curse and has fallen in love with a young woman named Margaret Aldis. When the family secret comes out, the lovers attempt to defy the curse and the story works out the consequences of their resistance.

The tale is in the explicit gothic romantic mode that the young James was experimenting with and that he would mostly abandon as he developed his more characteristic psychological method. The supernatural element is treated openly rather than ambiguously, with the curse presented as a real force that the characters must respond to. This is very different from the later ghost stories like The Turn of the Screw, where the supernatural is left deliberately uncertain. De Grey is more like an Edgar Allan Poe tale in form, with James trying out a mode that several American magazine writers of the 1860s were still working in.

The story runs about thirty pages. It is interesting now mostly as a sign of where James was at the start of his career, before he had found the more austere methods of his maturity. He himself did not include the story in his collected New York Edition, and it has rarely been anthologized. For readers tracing the development of his ghost stories from the early gothic tales through to The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner, De Grey is a useful early point. It pairs naturally with The Romance of Certain Old Clothes and Professor Fargo from the same early period.