This paper analyses two stories by Henry James and two others by Max Beerbohm whose protagonists are, at the same time, writers and ghosts. Such a diegetic scenario is interesting because it seems to point at a disguised metaliterary treatment of current ideas about fin de siècle authoriality and a peculiar metalepsis of the concept of the death of the author, later popularized in post-structuralist France. After a contextualization of Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s dissimilar but equally significant contribution to the genre of the ‘Decadent short story’, the discourse turns to the features of their writer-ghosts, in order to retrace not only their conjunctural literary value, but also their fascinating impact on aesthetical matters.
 
