Novel
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898
Opening lines
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
During an evening gathering begun on Christmas Eve, a man reads, a few nights later, the manuscript of a woman who has been dead for twenty years. At twenty, she had been hired in Harley Street by the uncle and guardian of two orphans, who demanded never to be disturbed, and then sent to Bly, his country house. The boy comes back, expelled from his school for no precise reason. She sees a man on a tower, then a woman in black by the pond; the housekeeper tells her that the man was the former valet, since dead, and names the second: the governess before her.
Context
The anecdote comes from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, who had it from a lady: children left in the hands of dead servants. James noted it in his notebook in January 1895, wrote the story in 1897 and gave it to Collier's Weekly in twelve instalments at the beginning of 1898; it appeared in book form in October with another story, then was revised in 1908 with a preface. The device does not settle the matter: the governess alone sees, but the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, recognises the former valet from her description of him, and the manuscript is read twenty years after the death of its author. Since Edmund Wilson's essay (1934), which saw in it the hallucinations of the narrator, criticism has been divided between a supernatural reading and a psychological one.
Who it is for
A short narrative, with a nested and deliberately ambiguous narration, which allows two incompatible readings and has prompted an abundant critical literature.
Prizes and reception
Turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten in 1954, adapted more than ten times for the theatre, cinema and television.
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