Classic
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Summary
A young governess takes charge of two beautiful, strangely secretive children at a remote country house and becomes convinced that the ghosts of two dead servants are corrupting them. James feeds the reader everything through the governess's increasingly fevered account, leaving it forever undecidable whether the ghosts are real or projections of her own mind. That calculated ambiguity has made the novella the most argued over ghost story in English.
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Historical Context & Significance
James published the novella in 1898, serially and then in book form, at the height of Victorian fascination with the supernatural. Its interpretive puzzle has generated more critical debate than almost any work of comparable length.