The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Turn of the Screw
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.
“I quite agree—in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?”
“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”
The manuscript has only been opened. Download the EPUB to follow the governess from her first night at Bly to the last page.
Download Full EPUB1898
~42,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 2.3 hours
Standalone
Bly, Essex, 1890s
24 sections in 12 groups
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.37 MB (EPUB) · 0.44 MB (AZW3) · 0.39 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #209
The Turn of the Screw is a short novel about a young governess who arrives at a country house in Essex to take charge of two children and finds that the house already has other occupants. Miles is ten and has just been dismissed from school; Flora is eight and startlingly beautiful; Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, is glad of company. Within weeks the governess sees a man on the tower and a woman across the lake, and identifies them as the master’s dead valet and the dead governess who came before her. The children, she becomes convinced, know far more than they say.
James published the story in 1898, first in a magazine and then in a slim book, and it has been argued over ever since. The frame is a Christmas Eve gathering at which a guest reads a manuscript written by a woman who has been dead for twenty years; the manuscript is the novel. Nothing in it is corroborated by anyone who saw the events. Whether the figures are ghosts, whether the governess is sane, and what the children actually see are questions the text leaves open, and the last page raises them again rather than answering them. See Wikipedia’s article on The Turn of the Screw for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #209.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, with a plot overview, a historical note, the characters, the themes, grouped section summaries and free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB downloads. The novel is short and tightly built: twenty-four numbered sections, no section titles, about 42,000 words. It begins at a Christmas Eve gathering in an old house, where a guest named Douglas produces a manuscript written in faded ink by a governess who died twenty years earlier, and it ends in a schoolroom at Bly with a boy dead in that governess’s arms. Everything between the two is her account of what she saw and what she decided that it meant for the two of them. The friend who copies it out says only that the transcription is exact, and adds no word of his own.
Henry James was born in New York in 1843, settled in England as an adult, and by 1898 had published The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians and What Maisie Knew, the last of which had already placed a child’s consciousness at the centre of a novel. The Turn of the Screw ran in Collier’s Weekly from January to April 1898 and appeared in book form that October. James wrote a preface for the New York Edition in 1908 in which he described the tale as a designed exercise in horror, and he never ruled on whether its apparitions are real. The refusal is not coyness; it is the method, and it is why the book still produces arguments among its readers. Its brevity was a condition of the commission, and the constraint shows in every scene, each one carrying a piece of evidence the reader is invited to weigh.
At Bly the governess has charge of Miles, aged ten, and Flora, aged eight, and the help of Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper. Their uncle and guardian, a handsome bachelor in Harley Street, has set one condition before he hires her: he is never to be troubled, not by letter, not by appeal, not by a request for help. A letter arrives anyway, from Miles’s headmaster, saying that the boy has been dismissed and offering no particulars. Then the governess sees a man standing on the old square tower, bareheaded and staring down at her. She describes him to Mrs. Grose, who names him at once: Peter Quint, the master’s valet, dead these many months. She describes him before she knows who he is, which remains the strongest single piece of evidence in her favour. The complete text is at Project Gutenberg #209.
The book is not a puzzle with a solution hidden in a drawer. It is a case with two readings that cannot both be true, and James keeps both of them in working order from the first page to the last. Read one way, two revenants have returned for the children they damaged, and the governess is the only person at Bly able to see them. Read another, a lonely and inexperienced woman under a burden she cannot share is assembling her evidence as she goes, and the children’s silences are the silences of children who are frightened of their caretaker. Neither reading is a trick: each accounts for most of the evidence and leaves the remainder unexplained. The manuscript form matters: this is testimony, not narration, and nobody in the frame can check it. Readers who prefer their supernatural cases settled should try Carmilla, where the vampire is identified and staked before witnesses.
What the novella shares with its neighbours is less a monster than a household: a large house, a servant who knows more than she says, a document that arrives too late, and an institution that fails the people inside it. The Woman in White runs the same machinery through a country house, a forged register and an asylum; The Monk shows how far the gothic could push a holy man’s fall a generation earlier. The Turn of the Screw strips the machinery down. There is no inquest, no confession and no rescue, only a lake, a tower, a letter that never reaches the post, and a boy who dies while his governess is looking at something else at the far side of the room. The stage is small, and nobody from outside it ever arrives to take charge.
Historical Context
The tale was written for a magazine market that wanted short, sharp fiction. James had spent the first half of the 1890s writing for the theatre, and the failure of his play Guy Domville in January 1895 sent him back to prose with a new interest in brevity and effect. Collier’s Weekly serialised The Turn of the Screw in ten instalments between January and April 1898, with illustrations; the book followed in October from Heinemann in London and Macmillan in New York. Readers who met it in a magazine would have taken it one instalment at a time, each one ending on an explanation withheld. Serial publication fixed the shape of the book: the breaks stayed where the magazine had put them.
The 1890s were also the decade in which ghost stories acquired a quasi-scientific vocabulary. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, collected testimony about apparitions and published Phantasms of the Living in 1886; William James, Henry’s brother, later served as its president. A story told as a manuscript, by a witness, in careful chronological order, with details that can be checked against a housekeeper’s memory, borrows that language on purpose. The housekeeper is the second witness, and her memory is the only corroboration the manuscript ever gets. The reader is placed where the Society placed its informants, asked to weigh a first-person account that cannot be repeated and cannot be disproved. The same middle-class public bought the Society’s proceedings and the monthlies, and the two vocabularies overlap.
The governess herself belongs to a long English type: the educated daughter of a poor family who works for her keep in a house where she is neither servant nor guest. Charlotte Bronte had made the position dramatic in Jane Eyre in 1847, and by the 1890s the governess was a stock figure of fiction and of advice columns. James gives her no name, no home she can return to, and no one to confide in except an illiterate housekeeper. Her employer’s one condition, that he never be troubled, is a condition about class as much as about convenience: the person paid to manage the problem is forbidden to pass it upward. Bronte’s Jane and James’s nameless narrator are separated by fifty years and by very little else in the way of money.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- The Governess: The youngest daughter of a country parson, twenty years old, hired by a man she finds handsome and never sees again. She narrates the manuscript, and everything the reader knows is filtered through her. She is intelligent, literary and wholly without experience of children or of houses like Bly, and the novel turns on whether her account is a report or a construction. She is never named, and no one in the frame ever reads her file. She keeps the master’s condition almost to the end, and her one letter is never posted.
- Miles: A boy of ten, beautiful, musical and preternaturally polite, sent home from school with no explanation. He plays the piano, recites, and answers every question with a courtesy that deflects it. Quint, the dead valet, had singled him out and had him perpetually in his company. Miles denies nothing and admits almost nothing until the last pages, when he says only that he said things. He dies in the governess’s arms. When he finally explains himself, the confession is shorter and stranger than she expects.
- Flora: A girl of eight with golden hair and unusual beauty, devoted to her brother and watched over by Mrs. Grose. She is found at the lake turning her back to the water, later standing behind a window blind at night, and later still on the far bank with a withered fern in her hand. Under questioning she says she sees nothing and never has, calls her governess cruel, and is taken away to London. Her refusal to see anything is the clearest counter-testimony in the book, and it comes from a frightened child.
- Mrs. Grose: The housekeeper at Bly, stout, plain, clean and entirely without imagination, who becomes the governess’s only ally. She cannot read, which is why the letter from Miles’s school has to be read aloud, and she believes the governess without ever seeing anything herself. Her memory supplies the facts that make the apparitions legible: who Quint was, what he did, how he died, and how close he had been to the boy. She is the story’s only corroboration and also its weakest, since she accepts facts she cannot see.
- Peter Quint: The master’s former valet, left in charge at Bly when the family was away, and dead before the story begins. The governess sees him hatless on the tower and pressed to a window, dressed in the master’s clothes, with red hair, a pale long face and small fixed eyes. He was, Mrs. Grose says, much too free with Miles, and so clever and so deep. He is the figure the story cannot explain away and cannot prove. No one but the governess ever sees him, and nobody in the house doubts that he existed.
- Miss Jessel: The governess who came before the narrator, young, pretty, a lady by Mrs. Grose’s reckoning, and dead by the time the story opens. She is seen in black, pale and miserable, across the lake, on the staircase and finally seated at the schoolroom table as if writing. She had been involved with Quint, which Mrs. Grose considers the greater scandal because he was so far below her. She wants Flora, the governess decides. The manner of her death is never established, and the household’s account of her stops at her leaving.
Core Literary Themes
- The unverifiable account: Everything in the novel reaches the reader through a manuscript that the frame cannot authenticate: a friend of Douglas transcribes a dead woman’s account of events nobody else witnessed. James builds his horror out of that gap rather than out of the apparitions. The governess reports what she saw; Mrs. Grose confirms only that the descriptions fit two dead servants; the children confirm nothing. A reader who wants proof is asking the book for something it has arranged not to supply, and that arrangement, rather than any ghost, is the real subject.
- Innocence as a performance: Miles and Flora are beautiful, affectionate and compliant, and the governess comes to see their goodness as the most alarming thing about them. Her phrase is that they have not been good, only absent: their virtue is a surface maintained for adults who are watching. Whether that reading is insight or projection is left open, but the theme is plain. The novel takes the Victorian cult of the innocent child and turns it inside out, making childhood a place where knowledge can be hidden rather than a place where it has not yet arrived. The governess never says what she thinks the children know, only that they know it.
- Service, class and borrowed clothes: Quint wears the master’s clothes and is called dreadfully below the woman he loved; Miss Jessel is a lady who dies in unclear circumstances; Mrs. Grose cannot read; the governess is neither servant nor family and has no home to return to. The hauntings happen inside a strict hierarchy, and the scandal Mrs. Grose reports is as much about station as about sex. The one person with power, the uncle in Harley Street, has forbidden anyone to trouble him, which leaves the household to manage its crisis alone. Quint’s clothes are the master’s, worn by the man who served him, and the detail is about borrowed authority rather than disguise.
- Letters that do not arrive: The plot turns on written messages: the headmaster’s letter, the letter the governess writes to the master and never posts, the blank sheet on a stormy night, the letter Miles takes from the hall table, the letters the children write and the governess keeps. Writing is how these people try to reach the absent authority, and the failure of writing is how the story advances. What cannot be said aloud is written down, and what is written down is intercepted, withheld or allowed to go blank. The manuscript itself is the last letter in the chain, handed to a narrator who cannot answer it either.
- The reader as the last witness: James does not resolve the case; he transfers it. By the final page the governess has told everything she can, the boy is dead, and the only person left to decide what happened is the reader. That is why the book has produced a century of incompatible criticism and why it survives rereading: each reading has to supply the verdict the text refuses. The horror is not that the ghosts might be real, but that the question can never be closed, and that someone has died while it stayed open.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Turn of the Screw?
The Turn of the Screw is short enough to read in two sittings and dense enough to reread for years, which makes it a good test of an e-reader edition. This one gives you the full 1898 text in the order James published it, the twenty-four sections as they were printed, and a file small enough to open instantly on an old device. There is no introduction telling you what to think about the ghosts before you have met them, and no modernised punctuation standing between you and James’s sentences.
The text comes from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1898 book, checked against the source file. Nothing is abridged: the frame narrative with Douglas and the Christmas Eve gathering is here, all twenty-four numbered sections are here, and the last page is the last page. The three formats are generated from the same file, so the wording is identical whichever one you choose, and the EPUB carries a working table of contents so you can move between sections without scrolling through a single long document.
The novel is usually read once for the plot and then read again for the evidence, and the second reading is the one that changes your mind. A clean text with real section breaks makes that comparison possible: you can go back to the tower scene or the schoolroom scene and check what the governess actually says. That is also the fairest way to approach the book’s famous ambiguity. You do not need a critic to resolve it; you need the text in front of you, and the leisure to doubt it twice.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #209 — the complete 1898 text, frame narrative and all twenty-four sections.
- Real section breaks Each of the twenty-four sections starts on a new page, so the table of contents works on phone and e-reader alike.
- Three formats, no DRM Download the EPUB, AZW3 or KEPUB directly; there is no registration and nothing is locked to a single device.
- Short book, small file About 42,000 words, it downloads in seconds and opens instantly on older readers without strain.
- The Phantom of the Opera — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Dracula — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Monk — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel is a frame narrative plus twenty-four numbered sections with no titles. The twelve groups below cover two sections each, in order; the first groups set up the house, and the second half carries the approach to the last page.
- Sections I–II: A coach and a commodious fly bring the new governess to Bly in June, where Flora, eight years old and startlingly beautiful, meets her at the door. Two days later a letter from Miles’s headmaster arrives with no explanation: the boy has been dismissed. Mrs. Grose, who cannot read, is more shaken than the governess expects, and lets slip that the previous governess, Miss Jessel, left at the end of the year and then died.
- Sections III–IV: Miles comes home from school, and the governess finds him as charming as his sister; the charge against him seems absurd. She and Mrs. Grose agree to keep the matter from the master, who is not to be troubled. Then, at the end of a long June evening, she sees a man on the old square tower, bareheaded and staring down at her. On a wet Sunday the same face appears at a dining-room window, pressed close to the glass.
- Sections V–VI: The governess describes the man to Mrs. Grose: red hair, a pale long face, small fixed eyes, clothes that belong to the master. Mrs. Grose names him at once: Peter Quint, the master’s valet, dead these months. He had been left in charge at Bly and was, she says, much too free with Miles. He had gone out to the village one winter night and was found at dawn on the road with a wound to his head, and the death was put down to a fall on the ice.
- Sections VII–VIII: By the lake Flora plays at the Sea of Azof and turns her back to the water. Across the pool the governess sees a woman in black, pale and dreadful, standing in the rain. Flora says nothing about her. Later that night Mrs. Grose admits that for months Quint and Miles had been perpetually together, that she complained to Miss Jessel and was told to mind her business, and that when she questioned the boy he denied everything and then called her a base menial.
- Sections IX–X: Reading Fielding’s Amelia by two candles, the governess looks up to see a figure at the door, then on the stair, then gone. There is no terror in it now, only a kind of confirmation. That night Flora’s bed is empty: the child is standing behind the window blind, looking out. She says she thought someone was there and saw no one. On the eleventh night the governess finds her at the window again, and crossing to the tower sees Miles on the lawn below, looking up at the height she has been watching.
- Sections XI–XII: On the terrace, with the children walking below, the governess tells Mrs. Grose what she now believes: the two figures are Quint and Miss Jessel, they want the children, and the children are already theirs. Their goodness, she says, is a performance, a policy and a fraud. Mrs. Grose suggests that the master must be told and the children taken away. The governess will not write to him, and when she is pressed she says she would leave Bly, both him and her, on the spot.
- Sections XIII–XIV: For a month the three of them avoid the subject, and autumn comes; the house, the governess says, is like a theatre after the performance, strewn with crumpled playbills. The children’s letters to their uncle are written and never posted; she keeps them. On a Sunday walk to church Miles asks when he is going back to school, and says he wants to see more life. By the graves he asks whether his uncle thinks what she thinks. Who will get him to come down, she asks. I will, he says, and walks into the church alone.
- Sections XV–XVI: She stays outside the church, half planning to run away, then goes back and finds Miss Jessel seated at her own schoolroom table in broad daylight, in black, her head bowed as if over a letter. The figure vanishes. The children say nothing about her absence; Miles remarks that they must do nothing but what she likes. To Mrs. Grose the governess reports that Miss Jessel suffers the torments of the lost and wants Flora. This time she decides to write to the master, and Mrs. Grose, who cannot write, tells her to do it.
- Sections XVII–XVIII: A stormy night, a blank sheet of paper, and no letter written; she goes to Miles’s door instead and finds him awake. He says he lies awake and thinks, that he wants a new field, that his uncle must come down and settle things. Next day she composes the letter and leaves it on the hall table for Luke to post. Miles plays the piano, Flora slips out, and when they look for her the boat is gone from its mooring. They walk round the pool in the dusk, calling her name.
- Sections XIX–XX: Flora is on the far bank, plucking a big ugly spray of withered fern, and asks where the governess’s things are. Asked where Miss Jessel is, the child turns hard and still and says she sees nobody, has never seen anybody, that the governess is cruel and she does not like her. The governess points across the water at the woman in black; Mrs. Grose sees nothing there. Flora begins to scream to be taken away from her. That night the child is removed, and Mrs. Grose agrees to take her to London.
- Sections XXI–XXII: Flora is feverish and, Mrs. Grose says, quite old; she now speaks of her governess with a horror that has nothing to do with Miss Jessel. Mrs. Grose reports the child’s appalling language and then, before leaving for London with her, admits the truth about the letter: it never reached the post, and Miles must have taken it. He stole letters, she says. The governess stays at Bly with Miles, alone but for the servants. At the first meal he looks at her across the table and says, with a smile, that they are alone.
- Sections XXIII–XXIV: Miles bargains: he will tell her everything, but not now; he wants to see Luke; he asks whether she thinks he took the letter. Then Quint appears at the window, and she holds the boy so that he cannot see. Miles admits that he took the letter, that he said things to boys he liked, and that the things came round to the masters. She cries out at the figure to have done. Miles, thinking she means Miss Jessel, calls that name, then turns, sees, cries “Peter Quint—you devil!” and dies in her arms.
The Turn of the Screw: Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Turn of the Screw a ghost story?
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Part of: Gothic & Horror Classics · Short Classic Novels
