The light is gold, the rooks are wheeling over the elms, and a young governess is walking alone in the grounds of an Essex house at the end of a June day, nursing a private daydream. She imagines someone stepping out at the turn of a path, one particular someone, who would see how well she is managing and approve. Then a man does appear, high on one of the old towers, bareheaded, his hands resting on the battlements, and he is not the person she pictured. The birds fall silent. He paces slowly from one corner to the other without taking his eyes off her, and then he is gone. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James sets its first ghost exactly where the narrator had set her wish, and the whole novella is folded inside that single image.
A Governess Who Wanted to Be Watched
The narrator is never named. She is the youngest daughter of a poor country parson, twenty years old, and she has taken the post at Bly because the children’s uncle, a dashing man she meets twice in London, put it to her as a personal favour. His terms were that he should hear nothing from her, ever. The novella keeps returning to what that silence does to a lonely and ambitious young woman. She longs to be seen being admirable. She tells herself, almost gratefully, that she has been handed a chance at heroism, standing between two orphans and something unspeakable, and the more she sees, the more certain she becomes that her seeing is what protects them.
That longing is the key The Turn of the Screw by Henry James offers early and never withdraws. Her account is written long afterwards, in confident hindsight, and it is studded with admissions she seems not to notice making: that she was swept off her feet in London, that she fancied herself remarkable, that she was dazzled by the children. Readers have never agreed on whether she is reporting a haunting or creating one. The novella’s real achievement is that almost every page argues both cases at once.
Two Pupils Who Turn the Screw
Flora is eight and Miles ten, and the governess finds them so lovely that teaching them barely registers. James turns their perfection into the source of the dread. At the edge of the lake, which the pair have renamed the Sea of Azof for a geography game, Flora is fitting a stick into a scrap of wood to make a little boat. A woman in black has appeared on the far bank. The child has gone very quiet and has turned her back to the water. Is that innocence or concealment? The governess decides in an instant. The reader cannot.
Later, well after midnight, she finds Flora’s bed empty and the child hidden behind the blind, gazing out at the moonlit lawn. Down below, staring up towards the tower, stands Miles. His explanation, sealed with a kiss, is that he wanted her to think him bad for a change, and it is so charming and so plausible that it lands as more sinister than any confession could. In The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, good manners are a locked room, and every polite answer might be a door quietly closing.
The quietest scene may be the most unnerving. Walking to church one crisp autumn Sunday, Miles asks in his sweetest voice when he is going back to school, then wonders aloud whether his uncle knows how he is getting on. They stop beside a flat tomb in the churchyard. Nothing supernatural happens at all, and yet the balance of power between a governess and her pupil tips over in a handful of lines.
The Absent Uncle Is the Real Scandal
The ghosts take the attention, but The Turn of the Screw by Henry James saves its coolest judgement for the man in Harley Street. He installs a valet he hardly knows among his niece and nephew, forwards the headmaster’s letter with the seal unbroken, and asks only not to be bothered. The children write to him; the governess keeps their letters, unposted, as pretty exercises. Nobody at Bly has the standing to call for help, which is exactly the arrangement he wanted. Seen this way, the house is less haunted than abandoned, and the ghost story becomes an indictment of comfortable neglect. The governess, neither family nor quite a servant, stands at the precise point where that neglect lands.
The objections are real and deserve plain statement. The narrator’s fervour, all exclamations and sudden certainties, grows exhausting well before the final chapters. The corruption the dead pair supposedly passed on is never defined, which some readers will find suggestive and others simply coy. And the snobbery runs deep: her first proof that the man on the tower is evil is that he is plainly no gentleman, and the book never fully separates its fear of the dead from its fear of the servants’ hall. Readers should be prepared for grief, implied abuse, menace towards children and a mounting fear for a young mind, though nothing is graphic.
Where Henry James Found His Ghosts
Henry James, born in New York in 1843 and dead in London in 1916, was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and is far better known for slow, sly social novels than for frights. He wrote this one at a low point. His play Guy Domville had failed on the London stage in 1895, he had lost his sister Alice and his friend Robert Louis Stevenson within a few years, and he was taking on a house at Rye, on the Sussex coast, when the commission came. The supernatural was hardly foreign to the family: his elder brother, the psychologist William James, was an active researcher into it.
Early reviewers took The Turn of the Screw by Henry James at face value. A New York Times critic set it beside Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a study of evil, while Virginia Woolf, writing in 1918, felt the dead pair lacked the independent life of true ghosts. James tidied the text about a decade later for the collected New York Edition without altering the story. Its afterlife has been enormous. Benjamin Britten made it a chamber opera in 1954, built around a twelve-note theme, and in 2020 Mike Flanagan loosely reworked it for Netflix as The Haunting of Bly Manor.
After the Last Page
Anyone arriving at The Turn of the Screw by Henry James for a modern scare should adjust expectations: this is a book of glances, pauses and unfinished sentences, and its terror accumulates rather than strikes. Those who want more of the same atmosphere can turn to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, in which another nameless young woman is undone by a dead predecessor in a great house, or to Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, which gives the governess figure a gleefully murderous turn. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whose shadow falls across Bly, remains the obvious ancestor.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James opens with a woman watching from a garden path and a house holding its breath. By the last page, the one being watched is her.