HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘The place, with its grey sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the performance-all strewn with crumpled playbills.’Revered as one of the greatest ghost stories ever told, James’s The Turn of the Screw is an eerie Victorian masterpiece.When an inexperienced governess goes to work at Bly, a country house in Essex to look after a young boy Miles and his sister...
The story starts conventionally enough with friends sharing ghost stories round the fire on Christmas Eve. One of the guests tells about a governess at a country house plagued by supernatural visitors. But in the hands of Henry James, the master of nuance, this little tale of terror is an exquisite gem of sexual and psychological ambiguity. Only the young governess can see the ghosts; only she suspects that the previous governess and her lover are controlling the two orphaned children (a girl...
