The Turn of the Screw

"He was there or was not there; not there if I didn't see him." One of the world's most famous ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw is a hauntingly atmospheric tale of shadows, lurking dread and psychological menace in which a young governess, hired to care for two orphaned children, struggles to protect her charges from the demonic influence of the eerie apparitions of two former household servants. Is the threat to the children really that of a ghostly and malevolent presence… or something else entirely? With its unreliable narrator and pervading sense of unease and uncertainty, The Turn of the Screw is a strange and deeply unsettling ghost story that continues to spark academic debate and has inspired countless film, stage and television adaptations and re-workings including the The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). Born in the United States in 1843, Henry James largely relocated to Europe as a young man and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. Renowned for his exploration of consciousness and perception through his imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators, he is one of the key figures in nineteenth-century realism and considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He is best known for his novels contrasting the innocence and exuberance of the New World with the corruption and wisdom of the Old, as illustrated in works such as Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Bostonians (1886).