Why did I love this book?
When I first read this famous tale, I was about seventeen and still lived with my parents when I wasn’t at boarding school or hitch-hiking around Europe. I began reading in bed late at night and couldn’t put it down even when I wanted to do so. The story begins at a Christmas gathering around a fire but moves to a large house in the country where a young governess is in charge of two strange children. I have always found children uncanny; they seem to exist at the point where innocence and evil meet. Henry James is a master of ambiguity and truly disturbing dialogue. I finished reading and couldn’t put the light out or go anywhere near the bedroom window.
7 authors picked The Turn of the Screw as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale' Oscar Wilde
The Turn of the Screw, James's great masterpiece of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension, tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something, or someone, malevolent is stalking the children in her care. Is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence, or a manifestation of something else entirely?
Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by David Bromwich
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