Owen Wingrave

Owen Wingrave is a short story by Henry James, first published in The Graphic in 1892 and later collected in The Wheel of Time the following year. It is one of his ghost stories, although the ghost is more implied than seen, and it is one of the few James stories with an explicit political point.

Owen Wingrave is the latest son of a long line of English military men. His grandfather and his aunt expect him to enter the army as every Wingrave has done for generations. He refuses. He has read enough history and thought enough about war to find the whole tradition morally wrong. The family ostracises him, his tutor disowns him, the young woman he might have married mocks him as a coward. He returns to the family house at Paramore to face the family and the family ghost, an ancestor who killed his own son for failing in courage and who is said to walk a particular room in the house.

The story works on two levels at once. It is a ghost story, and the haunted room at Paramore is where the climax happens. It is also a piece of pacifist writing that James cared about. He turned the story into a one act play, The Saloon, which was performed in 1911 with the encouragement of Edith Wharton, although it was less successful than the story.

At about forty pages it is one of the easier ways into James’s ghost stories. It is more political and less psychologically dense than The Turn of the Screw, which came six years later, and it has a clear sympathy for Owen that makes it easier to read than some of the more ambiguous tales. Readers who enjoy this story should follow it with The Jolly Corner and Sir Edmund Orme, both of which use a similar mix of family inheritance and the uncanny.