The Turn of the Screw

by Henry James

Overview

For lucidity and compactness of style, James's short novels, or novelles, are shining examples of his genius. Few other writings of the century have so captured the American imagination. When Daisy Miller, the tale of the girl from Schenectady, first appeared in 1878, it was an extraordinary success. James had discovered nothing less than "the American girl"—free spirited, flirtatious, an innocent abroad determined to defy European convention even if it meant scandal . . . or tragedy. But the subtle danger lurking beneath the surface in Daisy Miller evolves into a classic tale of terror and obsession in The Turn Of The Screw. "The imagination," Henry James said to Bernard Shaw, "has a life if its own." In this blood-curdling story, that imagination weaves the lives of two children, a governess in love with her employer, and a sprawling country house into a flawless story, still unsurpassed as the prototype of modern horror fiction.

"The Turn Of The Screw seems to have proved more fascinating to the general reading public than anything else of James's except Daisy Miller."—Edmund Wilson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788196076948
Publisher:	Avarang Books
Publication date:	12/28/2022
Pages:	150
Sales rank:	340,210
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York City, but spent most of his adult life in England. As a modernist author, he was especially adept at exploring his characters’ inner thoughts. James is well known for his ghost stories like The Turn of the Screw and transatlantic novels like The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady.

Date of Birth:

April 15, 1843

Date of Death:

February 28, 1916

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

London, England

Education:

Attended school in France and Switzerland; Harvard Law School, 1862-63

Read an Excerpt

The Turn of the Screw

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By James, Henry

Tor Books

Copyright © 1993 James, Henry
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780812533415

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one
 
 
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal I had at all events a couple of very bad days---found all my doubts bristle again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping swinging coach that carried me to the stopping-place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country the summer sweetness of which served as a friendly welcome, my fortitude revived and, as we turned into the avenue, took a flight that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so dreary that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a thoroughly pleasant impression the broad clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered tree-tops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with alittle girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsey as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be a matter beyond his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose affected me on the spot as a creature too charming not to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterwards wondered why my employer hadn't made more of a point to me of this. I slept little that night-I was too much excited; and this astonished me too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The large impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the figured full draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the wonderful appeal of my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The one appearance indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was that of her being so inordinately glad to see me. I felt within half an hour that she was so glad---stout simple plain clean wholesome woman--as to be positively on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflexion, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained just this last time with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and M brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her and to determine us--I felt quite sure she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me between them over bread and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence could pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and round-about allusions.
"And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very remarkable?"
One wouldn't, it was already conveyed between us, too grossly flatter a child. "Oh Miss, most remarkable. If you mink well of this one!"--and she stood there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
"Yes; if I do--?"
"You will be carried away by the little gentleman!"
"Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I'm afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"
I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley Street?"
"In Harley Street."
"Well, Miss, you're not the first--and you won't be the last."
"Oh I've no pretensions," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back to-morrow?"
"Not to-morrow--Friday, Miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."
I forthwith wanted to know if the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly thing wouldn't therefore be that on the arrival of the public conveyance I should await him with his little sister; a proposition to which Mrs. Grose assented so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh she was glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared not less than a little proud. Regular lessons, in this agitation, certainly suffered some wrong; I reflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out of doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll delightful childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming tremendous friends. Young as she was I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my present older and more informed eyes it would show a very reduced importance. But as my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairytales. Wasn't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big ugly antique but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-displaced and half-utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was strangely at the helm!
 
All new material copyright ; 1993 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Turn of the Screw by James, Henry Copyright © 1993 by James, Henry. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ix

The Text of The Turn of the Screw 3

Compositional History 93

Textual Notes 96

Contexts 103

James, The Ghost Story, and The Supernatural 105

To Thomas Sergeant Perry [So Much for Cora] Henry James 105

A Notebook Entry [Subject for a Ghost-Story] 106

A Notebook Entry [Another Theme of the Same Kind] 107

From a Preface [The Whole Fairy-Tale Side of Life] 107

To Theodate Pope Riddle [Beneath Comment or Criticism] 112

James on The Turn of The Screw 115

A Notebook Entry [Idea of a Servant Suspected] Henry James 115

A Notebook Entry [Grose] 115

A Notebook Entry [Note Here the Ghost-Story] 116

To Alice [Mrs. William] James [Finished My Little Book] 116

To A. C. Benson [Of the Ghostly and Ghastly] 117

To Paul Bourget [A Little Volume Just Published] 118

To Dr. Waldstein [My Bogey-Tale Dealt with Things So Hideous] 119

To H. G. Wells [The Thing Is Essentially a Pot-Boiler] 120

To F. W. H. Myers [The TV of the S. Is a Very Mechanical Matter] 121

To W. D. Howells [Another Duplex Book Like the "Two Magics"] 122

A Notebook Entry [Something as Simple as The Turn of the Screw] 124

To W. D. Howells [To Concoct a "Ghost" of Any Freshness] 125

Preface to the New York Edition [An Exercise of the Imagination] 127

Other Possible Sources for The Turn of The Screw 135

The Genesis of "The Turn of the Screw" Robert Lee Wolff 135

Psychical Research and "The Turn of the Screw" Francis X. Roellinger, Jr. 137

The Turn of the Screw and Alice James Oscar Cargill 141

[Moral Anxiety, Vulgar Sexuality, and the Victorian Governess] Mary Poovey 146

[Pure and Strangely Erotic: The Victorian Child] James R. Kincaid 153

Adaptations and Illustrations 161

Illustration in Collier's Weekly (February 12, 1898) Eric Pape 164

Illustration in Collier's Weekly (March 5, 1898) 165

Illustration in Collier's Weekly(February 12, 1898) John La Farge 166

At a House in Hurley Street Charles Demuth 167

The Governess First Sees the Ghost of Peter Quint 167

Flora and the Governess 168

The Governess, Mrs. Grose and the Children 168

Miles and the Governess 169

The Innocents Film Stills 169

Los Angeles Opera Britten's The Turn of the Screw (2011) 170

Glyndebourne Festival Opera Britten's The Turn of the Screw (2014) 171

Britten's The Turn of the Screw (2011) 171

Selected Stage and Screen Adaptations, 1950-2020 172

Criticism 175

Early Reactions: 1898-1926 177

The New York Times Magic of Evil and Love 177

Joseph Conrad To Ford Madox Ford [An Intellectual Thrill] 178

New York Tribune A Masterpiece Mr. Henry James 178

To Oliver Lodge [The Little Boy Feels Pederastic Passion] F. W. H. Myers 180

The Outlook [The Story Is Distinctly Repulsive] 180

To the Hon. A. E. Bontine [A Kind of Phosphorescent Trail] Joseph Conrad 181

Academy Portraits: Mr. Henry James Henry Harland 181

The Bookman Mr. James's New Book 182

Droch Henry James as a Ghost Raiser 183

On Books at Christmas John D. Barry 184

The American Monthly Review of Reviews Two Volumes Henry James 184

The Independent [The Most Hopelessly Evil Story] 185

Oscar Wilde To Robert Ross [Wonderful, Lurid, Poisonous] 185

The Chautauquan [Psychic Phenomena] 186

[Facts, or Delusions] Oliver Elton 186

Henry James, and the Ghostly A. R. Orage 187

[Henry James's Ghosts] Virginia Woolf 188

[Merely Declining to Think About Homosex] E. M. Forster 189

Major and Recent Criticism 191

A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw Harold C. Goddard 191

Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw Edna Kenton 199

The Ambiguity of Henry James Edmund Wilson 201

The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw Robert B. Heilman 203

Introduction to Stories of the Supernatural Leon Edel 210

From The Secret of Narrative Tzvetan Todorov 212

Turning the Screw of Interpretation Shoshana Felman 215

James: Twists of the Governess Henry Sussman 231

Recognition: Servant in the Ending Bruce Robbins 241

Screwing with Children in Henry James Ellis Hanson 244

The Turn of the Screw, or: the Dispossessed Hearts of Little Gentlemen Eric Haralson 252

Turning the Screw Again: The Precocious Colonial Child in Henry James's Story Paul Sharrad 260

An Innocence Worse Than Evil in The Turn of the Screw Michelle H. Phillips 267

Material Turns of the Screw: The Collier's Weekly Serialization of The Turn of the Screw (1898) Kirsten MacLeod 276

A Chronology Henry James 285

Suggestions for Further Reading 289

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Flosnik assumes the upper- and lower-class accents of nineteenth-century England, delivering the different voices with the rendition of a theatrical performance." —-AudioFile

Editorial Reviews

Remarkably vivid and disquieting . . . Whether this beloved 19th-century novella retains the power to frighten you depends on the degree to which you’ve ever questioned your own senses or doubted your sanity. . . . A classic of Gothic literature, prized for its ambiguity and sophistication.” —The New York Times

From the Publisher

More than a horrific ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is an enigmatic and disturbing psychological novel that probes the source of terror in neuroses and moral degradation…The Turn of the Screw will continue to fascinate and to intrigue because James’ ‘cold artistic calculation’ has so filled it with suggestiveness and intentional ambiguity that it may be read at different levels and with new revelations at each successive reading.”

Masterpieces of World Literature

Benjamin’s reading of the story, in a sweet British accent, is a calming contrast…Benjamin’s accent and emotional undercurrents are just right. This excellent production highlights James’ gorgeous prose and skill at creating and sustaining a mood of growing unease and horror.”

Booklist (audio review)

This enigmatic, chilling, classic ghost story is especially well told in semivoiced narrations. Simon Vance presents the introductory material…Suiting her presentation well to James’ elaborate prose style, actress Vanessa Benjamin then relates [the governess’] experiences.”

SoundCommentary.com

A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale.”

Oscar Wilde

Both narrators are skilled and capable, and render James’ complex prose as clearly as it would be on the page, if not more so…just what a good audiobook should do.”

AudioFile

The reader’s mind is forced to hold to two levels of awareness: the story as told, and the story to be deduced.”

literary critic and Pulitzer Prize–winning b Leon Edel

Simon Vance reads the brief frame story of James's novella; Vanessa Benjamin narrates the story itself, told by a governess who believes the evil ghosts of a former governess and servant stalk the young children in her charge. Both narrators are skilled and capable, and render James's complex prose as clearly as it would be on the page, if not more so. Benjamin conveys the classic question of the governess's reliability by making her voice pleasant and reasonable yet increasingly self-justifying and high-strung. However, her lower-class accent for the estate's housekeeper is too broad, and the accent she gives the children seems oddly coarse. But through her narration the eerie, claustrophobic effect of James's tale is heightened—just what a good audiobook should do. W.M. 2010 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

JULY 2009 - AudioFile