Turn of the Screw

Summary

Henry James described The Turn of the Screw , his much-acclaimed 1898 ghost story, as "a trap for the unwary". It was published in The Two Magics and is indeed a novella of great ambiguity that rarely makes its purposes or absolute truth clear. A young governess who is in charge of two orphaned children called Miles and Flora at the country house of Bly narrates the story. She has gained the post through the children’s uncle to whom she feels attraction and under the terms that she take all responsibility for Miles, Flora and the whole household. Although initially she feels comfortable with the pleasant children and Mrs Grose the housekeeper, she begins to sense a distinct evil and lingering sin in the house. The apparitions of Peter Quint, the old valet, and Miss Jessel who once held her position haunt her as she learns they are both dead and had had an indecent liaison. We follow the narrator’s attempts to keep her own sanity and prevent the children from communicating with the evil spirits, though we are never truly aware of whether the phantoms are products of the hysterical mind or real. This crucial aspect of uncertainty about the boundaries of the subjective and objective was removed in Benjamin Britten’s opera of the story.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24

More by Henry James

• Aspern Papers
• Washington Square
• The Portrait of a Lady
• The Real Thing
• The Middle Years

Other Fiction classics

• Lady Chatterley's Lover — D.H. Lawrence
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Billy Budd — Herman Melville
• Ulysses — James Joyce
• Dubliners — James Joyce
• Little Women — Louisa M. Alcott