The Turn of the Screw

A young, unnamed governess takes a post caring for two orphaned children, Miles and Flora, at the remote country house of Bly, hired by an uncle in London who makes clear he wants no contact and no trouble from her at all. She grows convinced, gradually and then completely, that the children are being corrupted by the ghosts of two former household servants, the valet Peter Quint and the previous governess Miss Jessel, both dead, both, in the governess's account, still exerting a malign influence over Miles and Flora that only she can perceive. The housekeeper Mrs. Grose neither confirms nor denies what the governess describes, offering just enough corroborating detail about the dead pair's real life conduct to keep the reader as uncertain as she is about whether any of this is actually happening or is instead the invention of an isolated, overwrought young woman. Miles, expelled from his school for reasons never explained, admits under the governess's pressure that he said things to boys he liked, a confession that satisfies nothing and clarifies nothing. In the climactic scene, the governess shields Miles bodily from a final apparition of Quint at the window, demanding the boy name what he sees and admit Quint's hold over him; Miles cries out, and when the governess looks again there is nothing at the window at all. She finds Miles dead in her arms moments later, and James gives no explanation for the death, no confirmation that any ghost was ever real, and no resolution to the questions the whole book has built toward.

James narrates entirely through the governess's own increasingly fevered first person account, so a reader has no outside vantage point from which to check her reliability, and the ambiguity this produces, whether Bly is genuinely haunted or the governess is dangerously unstable, is not an accident of the text but its whole design. It reads slowly and demands close attention to exactly what the governess claims to see versus what she merely infers, and its horror comes less from any single scene than from the accumulating uncertainty about whose mind the reader is actually trapped inside.

James dictated the novella directly to his secretary on a Remington typewriter, and based part of its premise on a real ghost story told to him in January 1895 by Edward White Benson, then Archbishop of Canterbury, concerning depraved servants said to be corrupting young children from beyond the grave.