Henry James’s Haunted Housing Market

Abstract: In ghost stories like “The Ghostly Rental” and “The Jolly Corner,” Henry James subjects haunted houses to economic processes of valuation and exchange. This haunted housing market illuminates the interpenetration of economics and the supernatural in James’s thinking, itself a reflection of underexamined affinities between the economic and the supernatural in the late nineteenth century. First tracing this logic in stories of haunted real estate, this essay concludes by turning to James’s essay “Is There a Life after Death?,” arguing that James’s economic thinking underlies his supernatural speculations: for James, rethinking economics is necessary to overcoming the material, mortal body.