I chose this audiobook because it just keeps turning up. I recently finished Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, which definitely earned its place on my list of all-time favorite books, and this novella is mentioned in it (along with a lot of other books, most of which I've read and enjoyed--the novel is definitely a reader's novel). I took a Gothic Lit class at Ole Miss, and although we didn't read The Turn of the Screw for that particular class, the novella kept coming up in discussions, and the professor showed a clip from the film. So I figured, why fight fate?
"The Turn of the Screw is a novella by Henry James, published serially in Collier's Weekly in 1898 and published in book form later that year. One of the world's most famous ghost stories, the tale is told mostly through the journal of a governess and depicts her struggle to save her two young charges from the demonic influence of the eerie apparitions of two former servants in the household. The story inspired critical debate over the question of the "reality" of the ghosts and of James's intentions. James himself, in his preface to volume XII of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, called the tale a "fable" and said that he did not specify details of the ghosts' evil deeds because he wanted readers to supply their own vision of terror."
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