The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

'James's setting has been much imitated... but no one comes near the finesse of the master'
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The famous and terrifying story in an edition which includes a unique selection of Henry James's ghost stories --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncles at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her? `The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, `the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes.

Henry James was born on 15 April 1843 in New York to a wealthy and intellectual family and as a youth travelled widely and studied in Europe. He briefly studied law at Harvard before he took up writing full-time. His first novel, Watch and Ward, was published in 1871 and many followed including Roderick Hudson (1875), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). He also wrote short stories, reviews, biographies, plays and travel books. After a brief period in Paris, James moved to London.He later settled in Rye in Sussex and became a British citizen in 1915. Henry James died on 28 February 1916. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.