The Third Person

The Third Person is a short story by Henry James, first published in The Soft Side in 1900. It is one of his late ghost stories, written during the period after The Turn of the Screw when he was working in the supernatural more frequently than at any other time in his career. It is also one of his quietly funny stories, mixing the ghost story conventions with social comedy in a way that gives the piece an unusual flavour.

The story follows two middle aged English cousins, Susan and Amy Frush, who have inherited together an old country house in a small English village. They take possession of the house with some excitement, both having reached an age when an inheritance is unlikely to come from anywhere else, and they begin the slow process of going through the old papers and possessions left behind by the previous family. In a locked cupboard they discover a sheaf of old documents that turn out to be the records of a long forgotten ancestor who had been hanged for smuggling in the early nineteenth century. From that discovery the ghost of the ancestor begins to appear, in the houseuir hallways, on the stairs, occasionally in the garden.

The two cousins react to the ghost very differently. Susan is alarmed and wants to do something practical about the situation. Amy is fascinated and finds in the ghost a kind of family connection she has been missing. Their argument about the ghost and about what to do with him gives the story its quiet comedy, with James playing the supernatural element partly straight and partly as social satire on two middle aged spinsters with too much time and too little to do.

The ending is one of the more surprising of his ghost stories, with a resolution that involves a practical action by one of the cousins that puts the ghost finally to rest. The story runs about fifty pages and works as a single sitting read. For readers who liked Sir Edmund Orme and Owen Wingrave, this is one of the lighter examples of late James in supernatural mode. It pairs naturally with The Real Right Thing and with The Friends of the Friends from the same general period.