A young inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora two small
children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown
man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint the master's dissolute valet
and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here
- `Sir Edmund Orme' `Owen Wingrave' and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the
Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem?
Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The
reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave or
victims of the governess's `infernal imagination' which torments but also entrals her? `The
Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous certainly the most eerily equivocal of all
ghostly tales. Is it a subtle self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian
culture filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply `the most hopelessly
evil story that we have ever read'? The texts are those of the New York Edition with a new
Introduction and Notes.
