The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw is a Gothic horror novella by the American-born writer Henry James. It first appeared in serial form in Collier's Weekly in 1898 and was collected that year in The Two Magics.

The story is a manuscript read aloud on Christmas Eve by a man named Douglas, written by his sister's late governess. It tells how she was hired by a man in London who had taken charge of his young niece and nephew when their parents died, and who did not want to be troubled about them.

She arrives at the country house at Bly, in Essex, with two children to look after. She begins to see a woman on the stairs and in the garden, and a man who once worked on the estate, and comes to believe that the dead are returning for the children.

The novella follows the governess's efforts to shield the children by herself, and it never settles how much of what she reports is real. That ambiguity is why the book is still argued over: some readers in the 1930s suggested the ghosts were her invention, and later criticism treated the uncertainty itself as the point.