In 1974, ABC Television in the US made a rather clunky version of the story with Lynn Redgrave as the governess. In 1971, Marlon Brando starred as the evil Peter Quint in The Nightcomers, a dark prequel to James's story. In 1954, Benjamin Britten's opera based on the story was first produced. The story has had enormous influence, indirectly, on the structure and tone of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, begun very soon after Conrad read The Turn of the Screw, and on films such as The Others, made in 2001, starring Nicole Kidman. Ainlee's Magazine, however, warned its readers in December 1898 that Henry James 'is by no means a safe author to give for a Christmas gift'. a beautiful pearl: something perfect, rounded, calm, unforgettable'. The American Monthly Review of Reviews called it 'the finest work he has ever done. The New York Tribune called it 'one of the most thrilling stories we have ever read', the Outlook called it 'distinctly repulsive', the Bookman 'cruel and untrue', the Independent 'the most hopelessly evil story that we could have read in any literature'. The tale, on publication, caused strong reaction. When he came to correct the proofs of the story, which was serialised over 12 issues in 1898, he told his friend Edmund Goose: 'When I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed.' So frightening, indeed, that he actually frightened himself.

He made The Turn of the Screw as frightening and dramatic as he could because he needed a new audience in America. Through his friend William Dean Howells he had made contact with a new young editor at Collier's Magazine in the United States, to whom he sold the serial rights for his new story. For most of his career he was sadly aware that his books would never attract a large audience, but there were times when he directly and openly sought popularity. James let the story ferment in his mind for more than two-and-a-half years before he set to work on it. It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children.

left to the care of servants in an old country house through the death, presumably, of parents. James wrote in his notebook: 'Note here the ghost story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I n January 1895, when Henry James was in the depths of depression due to the failure of his play Guy Domville, the Archbishop of Canterbury told him the story that became The Turn of the Screw.

Henry james's the turn of the screw