The Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead is a short story by Henry James, first published in his collection Terminations in 1895. It is one of the most carefully constructed of his middle period short stories and one of the most quietly disturbing meditations on mourning, memory, and the difficulty of carrying the dead with you across a long life.

The central character is George Stransom, a middle aged Englishman whose life has been shaped by the death of his fiancée Mary Antrim many years before the story opens. Stransom has never married and has constructed his daily existence around an elaborate private remembrance of his dead. He has set up in a Catholic church a small altar with many candles, each one lit in memory of a particular person he has loved and lost. He visits the altar regularly and adds new candles as new friends die over the years. The altar becomes the central act of his life.

The story turns when Stransom meets a woman who is also a regular visitor to the same altar. They develop a quiet friendship around their shared practice of memorial. Then he discovers that she has been mourning a man whom Stransom himself had reason to hate and whose memory he had specifically refused to honour at the altar. The conflict between her devotion to that one dead man and Stransom’s lifelong refusal to forgive him gives the story its agonizing centre.

The story is one of the most concentrated examples of James’s late middle period method. There is almost no action in the conventional sense. The whole story takes place in conversations and reflections, with the church altar as the central image around which all the emotional weight gathers. The ending is one of the most painful in his work and turns on whether forgiveness is possible when the person to be forgiven is dead.

The story runs about fifty pages. For readers who liked The Beast in the Jungle, The Altar of the Dead is its companion piece in mood and in method. It pairs naturally with The Friends of the Friends and with the longer late novellas.