The Turn of the Screw Summary: Henry James's Ghost Story That Refuses to Settle
What it is about
The Turn of the Screw is a gothic horror novella by Henry James, first published in serial form in Collier's Weekly between 27 January and 16 April 1898. In October of that year it was collected in The Two Magics, issued by Macmillan in New York and Heinemann in London. It is short, tightly wound and built on a single question that the text never answers.
The story opens on Christmas Eve, with an unnamed narrator among friends gathered around a fire. One of the company, Douglas, produces a manuscript written by his sister's late governess and reads it aloud. Everything that follows comes to us at that remove, a written account of events, read out by a man who knew the woman who wrote it.
The governess has been hired by a gentleman who has taken responsibility for his young niece and nephew after the deaths of their parents. He lives mostly in London and keeps a country house at Bly, in Essex. He hands her full charge of the children and makes one condition absolutely clear: she is not to contact him about anything. She travels to Bly and begins work.
Flora, the younger child, is already there in the care of Mrs Grose, the housekeeper. Her brother Miles is away at boarding school. Then a letter arrives from the headmaster saying Miles has been expelled. The boy returns for the summer and never mentions it. The governess, charmed by him, cannot bring herself to ask.
Soon she begins to see a man and a woman around the grounds. Nobody else challenges them or seems to notice them. They come and go as they please. From Mrs Grose she learns about her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and a former employee named Peter Quint, who had been close to each other and who spent a great deal of time with the children before they died. The governess becomes convinced the figures are their ghosts, that the children can see them, and that the children are being influenced by them.
The main characters
The governess is the whole engine of the book. Young, inexperienced, isolated and under strict instructions not to seek help from her employer, she narrates everything we are given. Her reliability is the central problem of the novella.
Miles and Flora are the children in her charge. They are charming, well-mannered and, in her reading, concealing something. Miles carries the unexplained expulsion. Flora carries, in the governess's account, a knowledge of Miss Jessel she will not admit to.
Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, is the only other adult in the house and the governess's sole confidante. She supplies the history of Quint and Jessel, but she never sees the apparitions herself. That gap matters enormously.
Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are dead before the story begins. They exist only as hearsay and as figures the governess claims to see.
The themes
Madness and the supernatural are held in the same hand here, and James never prises them apart. Either Bly is haunted or the governess is unravelling, and the prose is constructed so that both readings survive to the last page. Every piece of evidence for the ghosts arrives through her.
Death shapes the whole arrangement. The parents are dead, which creates the vacancy. Quint and Jessel are dead, which creates the haunting. The governess herself is dead by the time her manuscript is read aloud at that Christmas fire.
Isolation is the other engine. An employer who refuses all communication, a remote house, a servant who cannot corroborate what the governess sees. There is no outside authority to appeal to, and no way to check anything.
The ending, with spoilers
Flora slips out of the house unnoticed while Miles plays music for the governess. The governess and Mrs Grose find her by the lake. The governess is certain Flora has been speaking to Miss Jessel, and believes she sees the ghost herself and that Flora sees her too. Mrs Grose sees nothing. Flora denies everything and declares she will not see the governess again.
The governess arranges for Mrs Grose to take Flora to her uncle. Alone with Miles, she presses him at last. He admits he was expelled for something he said, but cannot remember what it was or who he said it to. Quint appears at the window. The governess shields the boy, who struggles to see. She tells him he is free of the ghost's hold, and then finds that Miles has died in her arms.
Why it still matters
The critical history of this book is almost as interesting as the book. Early reviewers took it simply as a frightening ghost story. In the 1930s, critics began arguing that the apparitions were products of the governess's imagination. By the early 1970s, under the influence of structuralism, readers largely accepted that the ambiguity itself was the point rather than a puzzle to be solved. Marxist and feminist approaches followed, drawing out questions of class, employment and the position of a young woman given total responsibility and no power.
It has been adapted repeatedly: a Broadway play in 1950, a chamber opera in 1954, films in 1961 and 2020, and a miniseries in 2020. It suits readers who want horror built from suggestion rather than incident, and anyone who enjoys a story that argues with itself. It is also short enough to read in an evening and long enough to argue about for years.
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