M. R. James is widely considered the father of the modern ghost story. He was a medievalist scholar and a provost at Cambridge and Eton College in the early twentieth century. He made a hobby out of writing Christmas ghost stories for his students and colleagues and eventually began to publish these stories in collections. Much of his short fiction reflects his academic background and his interest in archaeology and medieval art, architecture, and literature. A few weeks ago, Romancing the Gothic celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his final short story collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories with an online conference dedicated to M. R. James, his contemporaries, and the ghost story genre. Leading up to this conference, I decided to read as many of James’s ghost stories as I could. I made it through his first two collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). If you love a good ghost story, you can’t go wrong with picking up some M. R. James. Continue reading Classics: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James