Kim's Reviews > The Turn of the Screw

This short, classic novel is a story-within-a-story: a gentleman reads aloud the account of a governess to a group of vacationers enjoying themselves with ghost stories. Once he begins to read, the listeners fall away and the story is told entirely by a nameless governess. At its core, the tale pits two potential realities against each other: either the governess is mad a and hysterical or there are real, malignant spirits haunting the country estate where she works. Using flowery, dramatic language apropos for the time at which the book was published (1898), Henry James teeters between the two alternatives, never making it entirely clear which reality is true.

The book pits classic tropes against each other: hysterical young woman vs malevolent ghosts? Innocent or devious children? We are told that the boy in her charge was expelled from school for some behavioral indiscretion but we are never told what it was; and we are alternately told that the children were beautiful and good OR manipulative and dishonest. One never truly knows. Balancing on the knife-edge of uncertainty, the must make judgements about the veracity of the governess’s account - and we are told at the beginning of the book that she is deceased, so she can no longer be questioned. Her words must speak for themselves.

This is a good example of late-nineteenth century gothic writing and a classic, albeit long and wordy, ghost story. It’s not a hard read, although the prose is quite dense and I found that made it difficult for me to get lost in the story.