Read this if you…
- want a super short, super famous novella
- like ambiguity (was too much for me)
Skip this if you…
- hate "you decide what happened here" books
The 
Take
Too ambiguous, I get the “is it real or in her head” concept, but just too little to go on the whole book. Nothing was that satisfying and I don’t find myself overly interested in what happened because it was too loose
The lineage through The Turn of the Screw
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The Turn of the Screw built on it. - James's governess narrates against *Jane Eyre* — she half-casts herself as a Jane who might win her remote master, then wonders if Bly hides "an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement" - That's Bertha Mason by name-without-the-name; Brontë's madwoman in the attic is the haunting James is rewriting - Read *Jane Eyre* first and you hear the echo — and the difference: Brontë gives her governess love and daylight, James gives his only the ghosts
Depicted in Art
The governess sits with her arm around Miles in a tender, ambiguous embrace — the masthead image that opened the 12-part serialization.
John La Farge, 1898
Peter Quint stands on the parapet of the tower at Bly, seen from below by the governess — the first apparition.
Eric Pape, 1898
The governess collapses face-down on the lawn at Bly after another encounter with the spectral figures.
Eric Pape, 1898
The governess collapses onto a stone bench in the grounds at Bly after Miles produces a shock from his pocket.
Eric Pape, 1898
The continuation of the opening installment (27 January 1898), early frame narrative around the Christmas-Eve fireside.
John La Farge, 1898
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2011
David Bromwich's Penguin gathers the Screw with James's other ghost stories, so you read it inside his haunted register rather than as a one-off. Clean text, sharp introduction.
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Notable Quotes
If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?
Screen & Stage
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Martin Scorsese, film director, b. 1942: "One of the rare pictures that does justice to Henry James … beautifully crafted and acted, immaculately shot, and very scary."
- Oscar Wilde, playwright & poet, 1854–1900: "I think it is the most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy. I am greatly impressed by it."
- Virginia Woolf, novelist & critic, 1882–1941: "That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark. We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves."
- Jorge Luis Borges, writer, 1899–1986: Borges, who compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature, knew of no stranger work than Henry James's — and championed his tales for the Biblioteca de Babel.
- Stephen King, novelist, b. 1947: "[The Turn of the Screw is one of] the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years."