The late Victorian and Edwardian periods produced a distinctive strain of English Gothic writing, one preoccupied with dusty manuscripts, forgotten churches, and the dread that surfaces when the past is disturbed. M. R. James, born in Dover on the first of August 1862, gave that strain its most concentrated and lasting form, working across an unusual breadth of disciplines that few of his contemporaries matched.

Educated at Temple Grove School and later at King's College, James built a career that encompassed medieval history, palaeography, theology, art history, and translation, and he worked within the tradition of antiquarianism throughout his life. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and his scholarly pursuits fed directly into the ghost stories for which he became a distinctive literary voice. Those stories — gathered in collections including Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories, A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories — drew on his deep familiarity with archives, manuscripts, and ecclesiastical settings to generate their particular atmosphere of menace. He also wrote for children, extending his prose work beyond the supernatural. English was the language of all his writing, and the United Kingdom the country of his citizenship.

James received a Fellow of the British Academy, a Corresponding Fellowship of the Medieval Academy of America, and an honorary doctorate, recognitions that acknowledged the range and seriousness of his scholarly output alongside his literary work. He died in Eton on the twelfth of June 1936.