The novels of Henry James are filled with ghosts but most of them escape dramatic treatment These elusive specters are the voices of precursors that haunt his narratives compromising their constitutive freedom The Strange Freedom is an examination of the ways Jamess fiction is prepossessed by some major voices of the English literary tradition those of Shakespeare Richardson Fielding Gibbon Thackeray and Dickens This subtextual arrogation sets constrains to the unfolding in Jamess narratives of liberal and romantic freedomit places limits both to the absolute exemptions of aesthetic interest and to radical Bohemian abandon But these constrains and limits can be regarded dialectically as the enabling conditions of the very liberty they imperil Drawing on recent research on the spectral dynamics and indirections of literary influence by scholars like Adrian Poole Philip Horne Nicola Bradbury Tamara Follini and Peter Rawlings but also on earlier deconstructive work by John Carlos Rowe Prepossessing Henry James offers a speculative account of the way James is simultaneously resourced and restrained by his sources Along the way we discover how Hamlets ghost instills in James a fantasy of mental autonomy or how he adapts Gibbons Enlightened narrative to inhibit civic liberty with images of female sacrifice We see the governess in The Turn of the Screw possessed by the specter of Richardsons Pamela exposing social freedoms with liberal brutality We encounter Gray in The Ivory Tower striving to obtain personal freedom by repressing Dickensian figures monstruous fantastic And finally we recognize how much The Ambassadors owes to the ambiguous manner of Thackeray Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at httpwwwtaylorfranciscom under a Creative Commons AttributionNon CommercialNo Derivatives CCBYNCND 40 license