The Turn Of The Screw

The Turn Of The Screw is a gothic novella by British author Henry James in which an inexperienced young governess, a parson's daughter, takes a position at a country house looking after two children. The master of the house, their uncle, gives her full authority, wanting no communication about the children.

Her welcome to the house by the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, is genuine, and she is immediately taken with the little girl, Flora. Her brother Miles arrives a few days later, inexplicably dismissed from his boarding school: he seems to be a delightful boy.

Things change when the unnamed governess spots first a man (who is apparently the ghost of the master's valet, Peter Quint) and then a woman, the ghost of the previous governess, Miss Jessel. From just their gaze, she discerns that these two are after the children.

She manages to drag information about them and their relationship from the reluctant Mrs Grose and, between them, they decide they have to protect the children from the harm they believe the apparitions intend. Her vigils yield more sightings of the two, and the governess is even more certain of their ill intent.

As time progresses, though, the governess begins to wonder if it is too late: the children seem to already be happily in the thrall of these two. Should she, against instructions, contact their uncle?

For a twenty-first Century reader, this classic, however well written, will likely be a chore to read, a characteristic of the dense nineteenth Century prose being verbosity: why use one word when ten or fifteen will do, and the small print doesn't help the reader's search for the relevant point in each sentence.

For example, "Yet when he at last arrived the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow" is a sentence that might be distilled into a few words, if only the meaning could intuited, but really, life's too short to bother. In this case, maybe the movie will be better than the book.