One of the most disturbing ghost stories ever written, a tale of imagined danger and real dreadA young governess arrives at a secluded country estate, hired by the manor’s often-absent master to look after his orphaned niece and nephew. The young woman, a parson’s daughter, is immediately charmed by eight-year-old Flora–and Miles, two years older, seems like a perfect little gentleman when he is … gentleman when he is unexpectedly sent home from his boarding school.
But Miles’s steadfast refusal to reveal the cause of his expulsion is troubling, as are the staff’s whispered stories about the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, the mysterious valet, Peter Quint, both of whom are now dead. Most disturbing of all are the spectral figures wandering the grounds of Bly that only the new governess can see: a woman and a dark man who seem to take a special interest in Miles and Flora. No longer sure of what is real and whom she can trust, the governess desperately tries to hold on to her sanity and protect the innocent children from forces too sinister to name.
A literary masterpiece whose mysteries are open to endless interpretation, The Turn of the Screw has been haunting readers for more than a century.
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
more
Perhaps America’s greatest writer from our Realistic period, James’s ghost story sets itself above all the rest — and he has a lot to choose from. Consider this story a nanny’s mind game – but who is in control?
I studied James in my college years, even dedicating an entire semester to several of his works as one of my independent studies in my English major. Something about the way James told stories spoke to me, and I felt a connection to him as a person and as a writer. Many of his works annoyed me (The Golden Bowl, ugh!) but I still appreciated them. With Turn of the Screw, it was a master class in so many ways.
The plot is still open to interpetation: who is telling the truth? who is alive? who is actually sane?
All the same, the story is quite simple but oh so complex. It’s a study of intense psychology where the reader has to determine who is playing this game and who is merely a pawn.
If you like a bit of paranormal, and you are comfortable with a variety of impulse interpretations, you can learn a lot about how to draw in an audience from this book and James himself.
It’s more of a long short story, or a short novella, probably readable in one sitting over a few hours. It’s a good escape from today’s literature with a balance between flowery writing and direct plot and character development.
Take a chance. You will definitely have strong opinions.
If you are faint of heart please do not read this book, this was super scary.
This gothic story was just okay. So much going on it was just okay. I am glad I read it though.
I’ve never read this book before, but just listened to the audio book read by Emma Thompson. It was amazing. The writing was exquisite; it contained all the magic of poetry and prose.
Composed of dense, convoluted sentences, THE TURN OF THE SCREW is a tough read. I would imagine it to be a more difficult read for the generation now using more emojis and acronyms than words. The very first sentence… “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.” … was enough for me to not read this many years ago. Go back. Read it again. I’ll wait.
I can understand the reasons for reading this classic tale; however, that does not change the fact that I found myself reading, re-reading, and sometimes re-reading again, the single sentences that occupied nearly an entire screen on my Kindle. This ruined any chance of feeling any kind of atmospheric horror for me.
“The Turn of the Screw” is a novella that first appeared in 1898. That is significant because it is the same year that Bram Stoker introduced the world to Count Dracula. I’ve read DRACULA a number of times and have always found the language exudes horror as Jonathan Harker writes of his experiences in Dracula’s castle to his fiancé Mina. Granted, every author has a style, but I found Henry James’ style to be confusing obfuscation.
In defense of obfuscation, many writers use this as a way to advance the story providing bits and bobs of information along the way. I found the usual breadcrumbs offered very early here without ever bringing anything to its conclusion. Were the beautiful children evil? Was the unnamed governess simply mad? Were Peter Quint and Miss Jennings fabrications of an overactive imagination? I do admit that that last question does often go unanswered in the best of ghost stories however much atmosphere they present.
Perhaps with careful sentence by sentence study, I might feel some of the touted greatness of this work.
I looked at the SparkNotes once I finished, which talks of all kinds of sexual overtones and undertones – none of which came to mind while I was reading. Quickly coming to the conclusion that classics just aren’t for me.
If you’ve always wanted to read Henry James but aren’t sure you’re ready for The Ambassadors at 508 pages, try this. Unless you employ a nanny, because this short novel is a cautionary tale about child-care-for-hire. It’s also a textbook on story framing or boosting a story’s value to the reader by pretending the story comes from an actual written account obtained by a person who got it straight from a person who was there. James then boosts the value again — gives another turn of the screw — by making us feel that people who stumbled across the document later, after the person’s death, thought it so significant, they are willing to publish somebody’s diary in order to tell the tale. The novella draws on spiritualism or ghost stories, which were huge in James’s day. Indirectly, it’s about psychic mediums or people who insist they can put the living in touch with the dead. It’s also about dangers that befall kids when parents die young and they wind up in the care of busy relatives who then hand them off to nannies. The nanny or governness in question is barely grown herself, has never had charge of two children, or acted as head of household over servants on a country estate. Her life til now has been incredibly bleak, limiting and narrow. The book is also about the English boarding school system, which recently expelled the oldest child, Miles, for growing too fond of another boy. And there’s more. The governness and Miles are growing too close, also. And there’s a strong chance that Miles got too close to a maintenance man who no longer works there, and who recently died by mysterious means. In other words, neglect has led to abuse for Miles and his sister, and now Miles is trying to escape so he can continue school. The “hero” of the story is apparently the governness, because we’re getting the account straight from her. But if we shift to Miles’s point of view, the governness is an antagonist who insists that malevolent forces are loose on the property — forces only she can perceive — in the form of two ghosts, the maintenance man and also the former governness she replaced. For these reasons Miles simply can’t ever go back to school. What James is building toward is a tragedy, one that may ultimately be about what happens when a working-class woman’s real life starts to exceed her wildest dreams.
Henry James is a tough read for a contemporary reader. Wordy and convoluted, yet it was still a scary and captivating story.