The Turn Of The Screw(Illustrated) E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Micheal Smith
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

• Special Illustrated Edition: Includes 20 Unique Illustrations!
•  Bonus Features: Summary, Character List, and Author Biography!

Step into the haunting world of Henry James's classic novella, "The Turn of the Screw," now brought vividly to life in this special illustrated edition. Experience the story like never before, complete with 20 unique illustrations that capture the eerie, Victorian ambiance of this psychological thriller.
A Tale of Suspense and Intrigue
When a young governess accepts a position to care for two angelic children at a secluded estate, she believes it's the opportunity of a lifetime. But her dreams soon turn into nightmares. Are the children as innocent as they seem? Are malevolent ghosts haunting the estate, corrupting all they touch? As tension mounts and boundaries between the living and the supernatural blur, the governess must confront disturbing questions that gnaw at the heart of her sanity.

Bonus Features
Summary: A concise overview of the story, perfect for those who are new to this timeless tale or want a quick refresher.
Character List: Get to know the key players in this unsettling narrative, each contributing to the novella's complex layers.
Author Biography: Learn about Henry James, the literary genius behind the story, who transformed the way we experience narratives.
Why This Edition?
Captivating illustrations draw you deeper into the story's gothic atmosphere.
Additional materials provide enriching context, enhancing your reading experience.
Dive into this bewitching tale of ghosts, ethical dilemmas, and psychological horror. Whether you're a first-time reader or revisiting this masterpiece, this edition of "The Turn of the Screw" offers a gripping, multidimensional experience you won't easily forget.
Add this exceptional edition to your collection today!



 

Leseprobe

THE

TURN OF THE SCREW

BY

HENRY JAMES

ABOUT JAMES

The Story of Henry James: A Pioneer of Psychological Realism in Literature

Early Life

In 1843, Henry James was born in New York City.He was one of five children, and his father was a philosopher who believed in providing a well-rounded education for his children. As a result, young Henry grew up in a household where reading books and discussing great ideas was the norm.

Moving to Europe

When he was 19, his family moved to Europe, and this experience changed him a lot. He fell in love with the culture, the history, and the literary scene. In 1869, he decided to move to England and focus on his writing career.

Breaking into the Writing Scene

Henry started out by writing reviews and short stories for magazines. But he soon realized that he wanted to dig deeper into the human mind and what makes people tick. So, he turned to writing novels. His first big hit was "The American," published in 1877. This book looked at the clash between American and European cultures, something Henry knew a lot about.

A New Style of Writing

What set Henry apart was his style. He loved exploring the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters. This was something new and different. Before, many novels focused on action and plot. But Henry wanted to dig into the mind. He wanted to know why people do what they do. This way of writing became known as "psychological realism."

The Big Hits

Some of his most famous works include "The Turn of the Screw," "The Portrait of a Lady," and "The Wings of the Dove." These books didn't just tell stories; they took you into the minds of the characters. They made you question what you would do if you were in their shoes.

Later Life

Henry became a British citizen in 1915, during World War I. He wanted to show his support for England, which had become his home. He passed away on February 28, 1916, leaving behind a legacy that would influence generations of writers.

Conclusion

Henry James was a game-changer in literature. He turned the focus inward, into the complexities of the human mind. And in doing so, he gave us a new way to experience stories—one that makes us think, question, and reflect on our own lives. Today, his works continue to be read and studied, a testament to the enduring power of his innovative approach.

SUMMARY

A Chilling Tale of Ghosts and Innocence Lost: Unravel the Mystery of "The Turn of the Screw"

In his novel "The Turn of the Screw," Henry James transports you to an unnerving realm where the distinctions between reality and the supernatural are blurred. When a young governess is engaged to look after two seemingly innocent children on a remote estate, she quickly realizes that something is seriously wrong. Are the youngsters as innocent as they appear, or are they influenced by demonic spirits who roam the mansion?

The governess becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting the children, but doubt clouds her judgment. Are the ghosts real, or figments of her imagination? As tension builds, the stakes soar, culminating in a haunting finale that will leave you questioning what you've just read.

Prepare for a rollercoaster ride through the human psyche and the shadowy spaces between the living and the dead. This gripping tale challenges you to decipher the truth, making "The Turn of the Screw" a story you won't easily forget.

CHARACTERS LIST

The Governess

The unnamed central character, the governess is hired to look after Flora and Miles at Bly estate. Highly imaginative and prone to emotional intensity, she becomes convinced that the estate is haunted and that the children are in danger.

Miles

A charming but mysterious young boy, Miles is expelled from his boarding school for reasons that are never fully explained. The governess becomes increasingly concerned about his well-being, suspecting that he is in contact with supernatural entities.

Flora

Flora is Miles' younger sister. Initially seen as an innocent and angelic child, her behavior starts to raise suspicions as the story unfolds. Like her brother, she too becomes an object of the governess's protective instincts.

Mrs. Grose

The housekeeper at the Bly estate, Mrs. Grose is a simple, uneducated woman who becomes the governess's confidante. She informs the governess about the estate's history but never sees the ghosts herself.

Quint

Peter Quint is a former valet at Bly who had a significant influence on Miles before dying under mysterious circumstances. The governess believes she sees his ghost stalking the estate and is convinced that he is attempting to possess Miles.

Miss Jessel

The former governess at Bly, Miss Jessel had an illicit relationship with Peter Quint and died shortly after he did. The current governess believes she sees Miss Jessel's ghost haunting the estate and fears she wants to possess Flora.

The Children's Uncle

The governess's employer, the children's uncle, lives in London and has little interest in the children, leaving their care totally in the hands of the governess. He appears briefly at the start of the but plays no essential role in the taleevents that follow.

Douglas

A guest at the frame story's gathering, Douglas is the one who introduces the governess's account of the events at Bly. He knew the governess when he was younger and has kept her manuscript in a locked drawer.

Narrator of the Frame Story

The narrator is a minor character who is present at the gathering where Douglas shares the governess's manuscript. The narrator is the one who transcribes Douglas's reading, creating another layer to the complex narrative structure of the story.

Contents

The Turn Of The Screw

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

The Turn Of The Screw

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.

"I quite agree—in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—?"

"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them."

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it."

"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful—dreadfulness!"

"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain."

"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send to town." There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it." It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank God, no!"

"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"

"Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE"—he tapped his heart. "I've never lost it."

"Then your manuscript—?"

"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said. "She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had never told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when you hear."

"Because the thing had been such a scare?"

He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "YOU will."

I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."

He laughed for the first time. "You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been. That came out—she couldn't tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place—the corner of the lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon. It wasn't a scene for a shudder; but oh—!" He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.

"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.

"Probably not till the second post."

"Well then; after dinner—"

"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody going?" It was almost the tone of hope.

"Everybody will stay!"

"I will"—and "I will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. "Who was it she was in love with?"

"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.

"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"

"The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."

"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."

"Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.

He sprang to his feet again. "Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she was in love with, I know who HE was."

"She was ten years older," said her husband.

"Raison de plus—at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."

"Forty years!" Griffin put in.

"With this outbreak at last."

"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and "candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps just on account of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was in sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed.

He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little establishment—but below stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at school—young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?—and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. "And what did the former governess die of?—of so much respectability?"

Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't anticipate."

"Excuse me—I thought that was just what you ARE doing."

"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn if the office brought with it—"

"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in—

"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it."

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. "She saw him only twice."

"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."