Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4202 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-28
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 121 pages

Synopsis
The narrator is a young governess, sent off to a country house to take charge of two orphaned children. She finds a pleasant house and a comfortable housekeeper, while the children are beautiful and charming. But she soon begins to feel the presence of intense evil.

Customer Reviews

Ghosts in December
It's been over a hundred years since Henry James' novella was published. I'm sure readers at the time were spooked by its tale of ghosts threatening the innocence of two children, and the attempts of a quasi-hysterical governess to save them. It was that period of the Victorian era when séances and ghosts were popular, when spiritists promised to bridge the road between the living and the dead. People enjoyed sitting around a fire and sharing ghost stories, specially during Christmas time.

But times have changed and this novella is now more interesting as a controversial piece of lit crit rather than a frightening ghost story. Did the ghosts in the story really exist? Or was it all part of the governess' imagination? You are never given the answers. One interesting question which resonates with today's world is what kind of "evil" was inflicted on the children. It's suggested that a deceased governess and her lover did "depraved" things to the children, only to later return as ghosts in order to continue their evil influence. But what kind of evil exactly?

If you enjoy puzzles and hard-to-read English writing, this novella is for you; if you are after an easy page-turner, you are better off looking elsewhere.

Screw turner not Page turner
And this is the author who dared to belittle Thomas Hardy. Henry James, born of insipid wealth and Hardy, wrought of the brown Wessex earth, and so their writing shows.

Turn of the Screw is a novel that could only be written by James. Which is to say that if a room full of socialite closet homosexual virgins with infinite typewriters were allowed infinite time to come up with a spooky story, this would be the inevitable result.

James' pathological will to translate the world's broadest language into the prose equivalent of C++ code is on show at the height of its powers here. Marvel at 5 page diatribes that could otherwise be summed up as "She saw a man and he saw her". Gasp at 50 word sentences that translate as "Oh what a beautiful child he was; and oh what a beautiful child she was; and oh what a beautful..." Oh what's the point.

The point is that Henry James is every bit the author that deserves raucous deliberation amongst the Oxbridge set as they blaze through their short-lived literary phases, prior to a career in private equity. James is also every bit a writer that merits insecure puzzlement from everyone else (its not you its HIM).

Apparently this is a spine-chiller. Hilariously having assumed this category, it has the timeless excuse that people, you know, "in those days" would've found it chilling. Because, of course, people in those days were all Mr Darcy types who shielded wilting debutantes from the most villanous of stiff breezes.

Personally i prefer to think of turn of the century readers of Turn of the Screw frowing the same frown, yawning the same yawn, then rolling over for the same night's sleep as i did.

Atmospheric
I almost gave up on this tale but persevered because a trusted friend had told me that it would be worth it. She was correct. Wow! What a chilling ghost story. It has a very atmospheric setting, in a country home in England, during the 1840s. The tale begins with friends chatting round a fire. One of the group begins to tell a tale about a governess who was employed in the home to look after two young children. Their guardian, who is their Uncle, tells her he wants nothing to do with her or the children, and that she mustn't bother him. The governess begins to see two ghosts, whom she believes are the previous governess and her lover. She thinks these ghosts are meaning to harm the children. The children claim to not be able to see any ghosts and the rest of the household staff are equally bemused. The reader is left wondering whether the governess is suffering from delusions, or genuinely needs to save the children from the ghosts. The final pages had me gripped and the ending left me breathless.