The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction

The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square are novellas. Daisy Miller is intermediate in length while The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner are short stories. All five are among the best short fiction of Henry James. In the introduction Professor R. W. B. Lewis only marginally discusses the literary merit and artistry of these five stories; he is more concerned with developing biographical insights about Henry James himself. This fascinating introduction adds considerable value to this collection. The Turn of the Screw (1898): A reader new to this classic work should read no reviews, no essays, no forwards, and no prefaces. I made that mistake. Without going into details, my first reading of The Turn of the Screw was unduly influenced by my knowing too much too soon. There will be plenty of time after your first reading to immerse yourself in literary criticism and reader reviews. Washington Square (1881): When the young, handsome, articulate Morris Townsend shows interest in Catherine, Dr. Sloper immediately concludes that his true interest is her wealth, and moves to break them apart. Matters are complicated by Catherine's silly, meddlesome, and manipulative aunt, Mrs. Penniman, who functions as an uninvited go-between for the two young lovers. My fascination with Washington Square centered not on whether Townsend was genuinely in love with Catherine, but with the way in which Catherine revealed her inner strength in managing her increasingly strained relationship with her insensitive father. Washington Square may not have achieved the full psychological subtlety and complexity desired by Henry James, but it is far from a simple, superficial tale of bitter sweet romance. Daisy Miller (1878): Henry James is largely remembered and respected for his vivid portrayals of Americans abroad and their encounters with the cultural differences that divided the brash, young, immature American continent from the sophisticated, class conscious Old World. Daisy Miller appears to be the epitome of incautious innocence. She disregards European customs, seemingly quite assured in her own judgment that she is doing no wrong, only flirting with young gentlemen as would any American girl. As the story progresses, she becomes aware of the building criticism from the expatriate community, but apparently chooses to ignore advice from well-meaning, socially prominent women. Perhaps what makes this story fascinating is that we readers see Daisy not from the perspective of an omniscient author that is privy to Daisy's innermost thoughts, but through the eyes of a third person, a Mr. Winterbourne, an American bachelor living in Geneva. Winterbourne is obviously fascinated with Daisy Miller and the astute reader (or one who has read this tale several times) may question whether the narrator is perhaps unduly biased. The Beast in the Jungle (1903): John Marcher had from his earliest time, deep within him, "the sense of being kept for something rare and st

This book has five short fiction tales. The longest story is about 200 pages, and the shortest one is around 90 pages. This book is great for bringing on an airplane, or if you just have a short amount of free time. The stories are easy to read in an hour or so at a time.

On the surface this is a story about an either haunted or hysterical governess who juggles words with true virtuosity, stringing them into psychologically insightful sentences. But that is all just camouflage, as is the many-layered structure of this tale. When the chips are finally down, the truth emerges, even though it is never explicitly stated --- how could it possibly have been stated explicitly in 1898? --- this is a story about pedophilia and its effects on a ten year old boy. At the core of this tale lies the relationship between the boy Miles and his uncle's servant Quint at Bly, the uncle's country estate. The housekeeper Mrs. Crose informs the new governess that the too-good-to-be-true Miles had been "bad" in the past, he would disappear for hours in the company of Quint who was not only "much too free" but also engaged in "depravity." Sent off to a boarding school, Miles gets expelled for what he tells his classmates presumably about this depravity. When at the very end of the tale the governess confronts Miles about these matters, he appears to expire in the last four words of the tale's last sentence. Yet at the start of the unresolved flashback which this tale represents, Miles may yet be alive as a middle-aged family man named Douglas, who reads to his friends the whole tale as written down by the governess herself. Is Douglas the grownup Miles? James doesn't tell, but this remains a fascinating possibility perfectly consistent with the rest of this tale. Further conflations of characters are equally well compatible with the "facts." The uncle who lived at Bly and then left his estate at the very time of Quint's accidental death doesn't want to ever again hear of his nephew or to return to Bly. Could it be that it was not Quint who engaged in pedophilia, but that it was the uncle himself who abused his orphaned nephew? In their numerous dialogues the Governess and Mrs. Crose complete each other's sentences to such a degree that one gets the distinct impression that one is dealing with the ruminations of a single character and like Quint, so Mrs. Crose too can easily be removed from the scene. In fact James does just that shortly before tale's end, while getting rid of Miles' little sister Flora at the same time. He sends them to London to visit the uncle. There is one more character, the earlier governess Jessel, whose only role is to impose a certain degree of symmetry to the tale, and to appear in one climactic scene.Why all these dispensable main characters, why the fireside chat of all kinds of minor characters at the time when the flashback is entered never to be left again, and finally why even use a flashback? I think these are all diversionary tactics on James' part. The central story he tells is so very unorthodox, unnerving and incendiary that he prefers to hide it with great care and great success among all this clutter. As I said, in 1898 he would have been pilloried for openly writing about pedophilia. The challenge

Henry James wrote in a clear, precise even-handed American style that has not grown stale despite the passage of over 100 years. The two stories that stand out here to me are the two that are usually singled out by reviewers, "Daisy Miller" and "The Turn Of The Screw", the former because of its sensual European atmospherics and the fact that even back in 1900 an American female could be considered overly outgoing or prurient by community standards, even if she was probably just an extroverted American; the latter because James effectively creates the controlled terror of a ghost story involving children at a British greathouse, perhaps a bit like Poe. But the other 3 stories all have something going for them: "The Jolly Corner", is also a ghost story,set in New York; "The Beast Of the Jungle" creates a sense of mysterious suspense within the context of a couple's love relationship, and "Washington Square" is the story of a love relationship forbidden by the girl's sophisticated doctor father.

This is a good collection of Henry James' best. Each short story is a pager-turner rich with insights into American and British life at the end of the 1800's. He doesn't make his characters Romantic heroes but real, flawed, interesting and complex. James definately ranks among the best of the Realism and Naturalism authors like Twain, Dresler, Crane and Howells.