The Turn Of The Screw
I have somehow avoided James throughout my education. I did take a course in college on Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James, but I don't remember having read anything by him. He's not easy. His excessive verbosity makes reading him like cutting one's way through a jungle of words.
From what I gleaned, the book is about a governess who is hired to watch two children who have been orphaned. They live in a mansion in the country, called Bly Manor, which the governess describes as "a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!" Their guardian is their uncle, who wants nothing to do with them. The previous governess died, and was thought to be having a relationship with another servant, Peter Quint, who also died.
The governess starts seeing their spirits, and she's convinced that the children are seeing them, too. The housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, believes the governess, but never sees the ghosts themselves. So the central question of the book is whether the governess is crazy. She narrates the story, from a manuscript read by someone at a gathering, so she thinks the ghosts are real: "Was there a “secret” at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?"
In today's terms, the book is not frightening, but psychological. Some have theorized that the poor governess is suffering from sexual repression. As I read the book, I assumed the ghosts were real, as that makes a more interesting story.
In addition to the Netflix series, The Turn Of The Screw has been adapted many times into visual media, and I'll be looking at a few of them upcoming.
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