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Summary
Summary
James's chilling ghost story of innocence and evil
One summer a young governess is sent to take charge of Miles and Flora, two beautiful, charming orphans living in a country house. But silence covers their past. Then the servants reappear who, before they died, had looked after the children. As winter closes in, the young governess struggles to keep her charges from the unnatural influences which they seem strangely to desire.
Terror makes this a ghost story, while uncertainty makes it horrifying. Are the apparitions the governess' invention? And if so, does the evil lie not in the children, but in love-sick young women- and in adult society itself?
The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes and chronology of James Life and times
Author Notes
Henry James, American novelist and literary critic, was born in 1843 in New York City. Psychologist-philosopher William James was his brother. By the age of 18, he had lived in France, England, Switzerland, Germany, and New England. In 1876, he moved to London, having decided to live abroad permanently.
James was a prolific writer; his writings include 22 novels, 113 tales, 15 plays, approximately 10 books of criticism, and 7 travel books. His best-known works include Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The American Scene. His works of fiction are elegant and articulate looks at Victorian society; while primarily set in genteel society, James subtlely explores class issues, sexual repression, and psychological distress.
Henry James died in 1916 in London. The James Memorial Stone in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, commemorates him.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
One late Victorian Christmas Eve, around the fire, a man settles down to read aloud to the other house-guests the manuscript of a ghost story. His tale is that of a governess in another country house decades before, and of her two charges, a boy called Miles and his sister, Flora. Removed from the world in an idyll of apparent purity, things darken as the governess perceives, or perhaps merely imagines, that the children's last governess, Miss Jessel, and her Heathcliff-esque lover, the virile servant, Peter Quint, have returned from the dead to possess the children. And then a darker fear comes to her mind: what if the children are complicit in their corruption? What if they comprehend the presence of these beckoning ghosts, and welcome them? What do the children know? This is the premise of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), one of the best of all literary ghost stories, and the source for one of the very best ghost films, Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961). Clayton's movie is being re-released for the festive season, while in a new book in the BFI's Film Classics series Christopher Frayling offers a superb account of its origins and its spectral attractions. The tradition of a ghost story for Christmas seems to be a Victorian one, popularised by Charles Dickens. There are good reasons for the link: the long nights where the cosiness and warmth at home contrast with the murk and chill outside; the family associations of the season that draw us back to the home, the natural location for most ghost stories. There may even be faint traces of a response to the incarnation that Christmas celebrates, the ghost in the stories standing for a spiritual remnant that lingers once our bodies are consigned to the earth. In its own way, James's tale has become a modern myth, reinterpreted by Clayton, but also transformed into Benjamin Britten's authentically spooky opera, or reimagined faintly in Susan Hill's excellent The Woman in Black. Like other gothic classics, it has broken its own bounds and possessed the spirit of later creations. The reverberations that the story has elicited correspond to its own sense of indebtedness: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre haunts The Turn of the Screw, just as it and Clayton's film haunt Alejandro Amenabar's The Others (2001). The film's casting similarly alerts us to echoes of other works. As the governess (named Miss Giddens in the film), Deborah Kerr evokes recollections of her previous roles: she had good form for the part, memorably playing a laced-up governess in The King and I (1956) and having already been terrorised in a remote house in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's magnificent Black Narcissus (1947). Her earnest intensity provides the keynote of the film. It is a rigorously serious movie, remarkable for the absence of the nervous laughter that characterises many ghost movies; there's no wisecracking, cowardly Bob Hope figure here to slacken the tension with a gag. The Turn of the Screw may be a tale told at Christmas, but the story itself plays out in the brilliant radiance of spring and summer. For a gothic work, The Innocents is a noticeably brightly lit movie, limpid with sunshine. (It's all cinematic illusion, of course - the film was shot in February.) There's the blanched effect of Kerr's Scottish pallor, her blonde hair; Miles's horse is white, his pigeons are white, the roses in the gardens are white, and the governess's nightgown too; at night, she stalks the house holding aloft a burning candle, a symbol, it appears, of a fragile enlightenment. And then comes the shade, the unlit corridors, the zones of blackness at the periphery of the screen. Images flit past, too rapid or unclear to be grasped; sounds resonate without origin, voices ricochet around the panelled walls; laughter strikes and vanishes; someone, somewhere, sobs. The great problem of ghosts on stage is the solidity, the fleshiness of the spectre; for all that make up and lighting can do, an actor must embody them. Film both inherits this difficulty and, by virtue of the medium's own evanescence, sometimes transcends it. While Peter Wyngarde's Quint is all vulgar, physical presence, Clytie Jessop's Miss Jessel remains the ideal cinematic ghost, perhaps the best (that is, the most uncanny, most disturbing) apparition ever put on film; it's hard to see how CGI could improve on her. Few on-screen spirits have seemed so genuinely disembodied. We glimpse her at a distance, across the lake, awkwardly standing among the reeds; black-dressed, her hair dank, her eyes scoured out by shadows. Although she is there before our eyes, she still seems insubstantial, no more than an image, a faded photograph, a glimmer in the lens. We look at her, but fail to know how we see her. These hesitancies in trusting our perceptions take us to the heart of James's story. Ever since Edmund Wilson argued this case in the 1930s, debate has turned on the question of whether the ghosts are really present (and therefore the governess is a heroine battling with demons) or whether they are in fact only dreamed up by her - or even perhaps there but unperceived by her young charges. In the latter cases, our heroine becomes a deluded abuser, tormenting innocent children with a knowledge they ought not to possess. The Turn of the Screw and The Innocents depend on our culture's strange unease about children. It's there in all gothic tales - a genre that depends upon the recalling of childhood fears. This is often accomplished through using the accoutrements of the playroom - the dolls and puppets, or the nursery rhymes of Britten's opera - or by returning us to infantile terrors, back to the moment when something lurked beneath the bed, waited in the shadows of the wardrobe, or brooded deep in the gloom at the top of the stairs. Moreover children themselves have come to seem uncanny. From my own experience, I know that this feeling is not merely an adult's one. As a boy in the 1970s, watching Village of the Damned (1960), Wolf Rilla's adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, I was terrorised by the sight of that movie's blond, Hitler-youth-style alien children. My fear was about children who were not acting like children, whose stares suggested the possession of hidden powers, of a more than grown-up knowledge. Their leader was acted with sinister force by Martin Stephens, who in The Innocents plays a similarly disturbing Miles. This is a boy ready to kiss his governess with an out-of-place intensity, one which she appears, at the film's grim close, to return. In watching The Innocents, there is a kind of perpetual double-take, akin to Miss Giddens's doubts, whereby sometimes we see two sweet child-actors, and sometimes two jarringly sinister monsters. The governess desires children to be unspotted; but this yearning for wholesomeness necessarily evokes the fear that it might be corrupted. Once we create a space for innocence, it seems we force ourselves anxiously to picture its fall. In the course of both James's novella and Clayton's film, the audience may wonder who is the real object of fear here - the ghosts or the governess? If asked, the children might declare it is the latter, terrorised as they are by Miss Giddens's insistence that they own up to their (supposed) hidden knowledge. So it is that several times in the film, as in the book, our heroine stands or sits where the ghosts just were, one governess in the place of another; doing so sometimes strikes fear into her fellow servants, just as the ghosts have aroused fear in her. Miss Giddens supplants Miss Jessel, and the governess's terror is that the dead Quint and Miss Jessel wish to merge with Miles and Flora. Statues of cupids, satyrs and garden gods surround the house, images of a disturbingly hedonistic pagan past, and so the dead lovers' illicit lust beleaguers and perhaps invades the governess's pious Victorian virtue. Henry James declared that the novelist was someone on whom nothing is lost, and certainly few people have ever been so able to garner all the distinctions and subtleties of human behaviour. Yet this facility was also potentially a kind of trap, the nose for nuance at fault when misapplied, when projected on to the necessary secrets and privacies of childhood. In reading The Turn of the Screw, in watching The Innocents, it can seem as though James was offering up a self-criticism, exposing the moral dangers of his own curiosity, those finely discriminating habits of mind. Unlike the sturdy, kind-hearted, illiterate housekeeper Mrs Grose, the governess falls into the trap of over-reading things, fantastically assigning the worst possible motives and meanings to what may after all be two blameless, ordinarily naughty children. So it is that The Innocents is a film that infiltrates and celebrates the imagination, while recognising that faculty's pitfalls. For, it argues, while the imaginative may understand situations and people better, sometimes, to their and our danger, they see rather more than is there. The Innocents is out on limited release. - Michael Newton Caption: Captions: The real object of fear? Deborah Kerr in The Innocents In its own way, [Henry James]'s tale has become a modern myth, reinterpreted by [Jack Clayton], but also transformed into Benjamin Britten's authentically spooky opera, or reimagined faintly in Susan Hill's excellent The Woman in Black. Like other gothic classics, it has broken its own bounds and possessed the spirit of later creations. The reverberations that the story has elicited correspond to its own sense of indebtedness: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre haunts The Turn of the Screw, just as it and Clayton's film haunt Alejandro Amenabar's The Others (2001). Moreover children themselves have come to seem uncanny. From my own experience, I know that this feeling is not merely an adult's one. As a boy in the 1970s, watching Village of the Damned (1960), Wolf Rilla's adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, I was terrorised by the sight of that movie's blond, Hitler-youth-style alien children. My fear was about children who were not acting like children, whose stares suggested the possession of hidden powers, of a more than grown-up knowledge. Their leader was acted with sinister force by Martin Stephens, who in The Innocents plays a similarly disturbing Miles. This is a boy ready to kiss his governess with an out-of-place intensity, one which she appears, at the film's grim close, to return. In watching The Innocents, there is a kind of perpetual double-take, akin to Miss [Giddens]'s doubts, whereby sometimes we see two sweet child-actors, and sometimes two jarringly sinister monsters. The governess desires children to be unspotted; but this yearning for wholesomeness necessarily evokes the fear that it might be corrupted. Once we create a space for innocence, it seems we force ourselves anxiously to picture its fall. In the course of both James's novella and Clayton's film, the audience may wonder who is the real object of fear here - the ghosts or the governess? If asked, the children might declare it is the latter, terrorised as they are by Miss Giddens's insistence that they own up to their (supposed) hidden knowledge. So it is that several times in the film, as in the book, our heroine stands or sits where the ghosts just were, one governess in the place of another; doing so sometimes strikes fear into her fellow servants, just as the ghosts have aroused fear in her. Miss Giddens supplants Miss Jessel, and the governess's terror is that the dead [Peter Quint] and Miss Jessel wish to merge with [Miles] and [Flora]. Statues of cupids, satyrs and garden gods surround the house, images of a disturbingly hedonistic pagan past, and so the dead lovers' illicit lust beleaguers and perhaps invades the governess's pious Victorian virtue. - Michael Newton.
New York Review of Books Review
"THE TURN OF THE SCREW" is one of the most chilling ghost stories ever, largely because it is so deliciously elusive. Its author, Henry James, refuses to single out the good and the bad, the mad and the sane. Are there malevolent spirits haunting this Essex country home, or is there simply an isolated and nervous young woman whose sanity slowly erodes? It's an amusing but not essential argument. Either way, something nasty is afoot at Bly, and the discomfort is doled out precisely and relentlessly by James. The spareness of the writing gives the story its power and eerie credibility: There are no great, startling, gotcha scares. Instead it's a queasy terror built on unsettling pieces of information; curious reactions; small, pointed lies. As an audiobook reader, the British actress Emma Thompson (she of such distinct sense and sensibility) pairs perfectly for this effect. Certainly nothing bad can happen to this capable young woman with an arch sense of humor - yet it does, and the horror is only magnified by the determined pragmatism with which the story unfolds. After a cursory interview, Thompson's nameless governess travels from London to the countryside to take charge of two young children, Miles and Flora, who are orphans. Their uncle, a dashing fellow with whom our governess becomes a bit smitten, offers one edict: He wants to know absolutely nothing about the children. Not their successes, not their problems, not their welfare. She is to "take the whole thing over and let him alone." It's a strange, unsettling assignment, and herein James begins his subtle but consistent attack on the reader. Upon her arrival at the rambling house in Essex, the governess finds a friend in Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, an earthy, warm woman - beautifully voiced, like the children, by Thompson - who is so desperately grateful for the arrival of our governess that she's "on her guard against showing it too much." Little Flora is beautiful and sweet and terribly polite. All, it seems, may be well - until Flora's older brother, Miles, arrives home expelled from school, bearing a vague report that declares him "an injury to the others." The governess fiercely ignores such a suggestion: Miles is even more enchanting than his sister: "divine." She is besotted with both of the obedient, golden-haired children. They will stay with her at Bly and make a cozy family. Then the ghosts come, a pair of lovers - a house valet named Quint who came to an ugly end and the children's former nanny, whose death remains a mystery. These are not screeching, wild spirits. Instead they linger. They watch. They want the children, and it seems the children may want them. The ghost story has long been a sneakily feminist realm in which female characters are allowed to do the protecting, the fighting and the heroic deeds, and "The Turn of the Screw" is no different. Says the governess of facing down the spectral Quint: "There was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not." She leaves no doubt that this is a woman becoming her own hero - protecting her two young charges against the ravenous ghosts. But the children (as children often do) have other plans. Voiced quite stunningly by Thompson, in a singsong lilt that is not remotely sweet, Miles and Flora are just as unnerving as the speechless ghosts. Thompson has captured perfectly the gentle flirtation of children's manipulation: "When I'm bad I am bad," Miles murmurs. While the ghosts transmit a conscious aura of evil, the children are the true game-players here: As much as the governess is determined to save them, they don't want to be saved. In fact, they want to run headlong into danger. They lie beautifully and sweetly: the sociopathic fibs of children, denial in the face of the obvious. The governess describes one of Flora's lies as "the glitter of a drawn blade." "The Turn of the Screw," first published in 1898, is a story strangely suited for the age of anxious helicopter parenting. It preys on the determination to keep children safe, to watch their every move, to know their inner lives. The fear that around every corner is a stranger who might wish them ill, and that they, in their innocence, may fail to recognize the danger. It's reflected in the governess's increasing panic regarding the whereabouts of her charges - when Miles distracts her, Flora immediately takes the chance to vanish outside, risking her life with dark spirits. There is a reason so many good ghost stories revolve around children: They can be the most able and adamant of liars, yet we want to believe, so fervently, in their innocence. We can't know where they go in their inner lives, those daydream moments in which they seem nearly haunted. In this age of anxiety, in which a child may be in her room and yet, through a laptop, can be anywhere in the world, "The Turn of the Screw" is particularly resonant - every parent's battle to protect children from unnamed malevolence. GILLIAN FLYNN'S novels include, most recently, "Gone Girl." She won a 2015 Edgar Award for "The Grownup," a ghost story.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Turn of the Screw one I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal I had at all events a couple of very bad days--found all my doubts bristle again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping swinging coach that carried me to the stopping-place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country the summer sweetness of which served as a friendly welcome, my fortitude revived and, as we turned into the avenue, took a flight that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so dreary that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a thoroughly pleasant impression the broad clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered tree-tops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made ita different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsey as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be a matter beyond his promise. I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose affected me on the spot as a creature too charming not to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterwards wondered why my employer hadn't made more of a point to me of this. I slept little that night--I was too much excited; and this astonished me too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The large impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the figured full draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the wonderful appeal of my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The one appearance indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was that of her being so inordinately glad to see me. I felt within half an hour that she was so glad--stout simple plain clean wholesome woman--as to be positively on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflexion, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy. But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained just this last time with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her and to determine us--I felt quite sure she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in myadmiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me between them over bread and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence could pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and round-about allusions. "And the little boy---does he look like her? Is he too so very remarkable?" One wouldn't, it was already conveyed between us, too grossly flatter a child. "Oh Miss, most remarkable. If you think well of this one!"--and she stood there with a plate in her hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us. "Yes; if I do--?" "You will be carried away by the little gentleman!" "Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I'm afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!" I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley Street?" "In Harley Street." "Well, Miss, you're not the first--and you won't be the last." "Oh I've no pretensions," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back to-morrow?" "Not to-morrow--Friday, Miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage." I forthwith wanted to know if the proper as well as the pleasant and friendly thing wouldn't therefore be that on the arrival of the public conveyance I should await him with his little sister; a proposition to which Mrs. Grose assentedso heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh she was glad I was there! What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared not less than a little proud. Regular lessons, in this agitation, certainly suffered some wrong; I reflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out of doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll delightful childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming tremendous friends. Young as she was I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my present older and more informed eyes it would show a very reduced importance. But as my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of theyoung idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Wasn't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big ugly antique but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-displaced and half-utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was strangely at the helm! All new material copyright (c) 1993 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Excerpted from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
