After an absence of thirty-three years, Spencer Brydon returns from abroad to New York City. He makes this dramatic move in order to oversee improvements to his property, which consists of two houses that have been the source of his financial independence throughout his life. One is in the process of being converted into apartments, while the other, the “jolly corner” of the title, is the house in which Brydon grew up and which he therefore is loathe to alter in any way.

In the course of conversations with Miss Staverton, Brydon reflects on what sort of person he might have become had he not chosen to tramp about the world for most of his adult life and had instead stayed in his native United States. Miss Staverton has her views, which do not entirely coincide with those of Brydon. It transpires that Brydon harbors a desire to confront what he terms his “alter ego,” the self he might have been. Miss Staverton reveals that, somewhat incomprehensibly, she has already seen this other self—in her dreams. She, however, declines to disclose what she has seen.

Brydon is in the habit of coming to the jolly corner in the evenings after he has dined out and before retiring to the hotel where he lodges (the house itself remaining empty for the moment). In the course of his nocturnal prowlings about the premises, he hopes to encounter his alter ego, who, in Brydon’s view of things, haunts the house as a ghost. While stalking the creature,...

At age fifty-six, Spencer Brydon returns to New York City after spending thirty-three years of his life in Europe. When he left New York, he...