author - "Henry James"
Description
One of the most famous ghost stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw earned its place in the annals of influential English novellas not for its qualities as a gothic ghost story, but rather for the many complex and subtle ways the reader can come to opposing conclusions as to tale’s very nature. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they figments of her quiet insanity?
The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serial, and later went through many revisions by James himself. Though there aren’t any overt suggestion that James intended his novella to be anything but a simple ghost story, the ambiguity in the narrative has captured the imagination of generations of readers and critics.
rents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at Boulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not so vulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her.
"She knows what I think of them," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed she knows what I think of most things."
"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I replied laughing.
"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little difference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of all what I think of Flor
tel isn't much; but the piano is better thanthat fearful old thing at the Sebago House. Sometimes I godownstairs and talk to the lady who keeps the books--a French lady,who is remarkably polite. She is very pretty, and always wears ablack dress, with the most beautiful fit; she speaks a littleEnglish; she tells me she had to learn it in order to converse withthe Americans who come in such numbers to this hotel. She has givenme a great deal of information about the position of woman in France,and much of it is very encouraging. But she has told me at the sametime some things that I should not like to write to you (I amhesitating even about putting them into my journal), especially if myletters are to be handed round in the family. I assure you theyappear to talk about things here that we never think of mentioning atBangor, or even of thinking about. She seems to think she can tellme everything, because I told her I was travelling for generalculture. Well, I DO want to know so much that it
daub on the easel.
"Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French."
"To learn French?"
"To take lessons."
"To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?"
"From you!"
"From me, my child? How should I give lessons?"
"Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!" said Mademoiselle Noemie, with soft brevity.
M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter's eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. "Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language?" he inquired, with an appealing quaver.
"To study French?" asked Newman, staring.
M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. "A little conversation!"
"Conversation--that's it!" murmured Mademoiselle Noemie, who had caught the word. "The conversation of the best society."
"Our French conversation is famous, you know," M. Nioche ventured to continue. "It's a great talent."
"But
than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just as there had been an impression that he had "served," as the London populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many co
heir accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father's death he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money- -it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he could be, that a doctor he persis
ticular, the various hotels at which they had stopped. "That English lady in the cars," she said--"Miss Featherstone-- asked me if we didn't all live in hotels in America. I told her I had never been in so many hotels in my life as since I came to Europe. I have never seen so many--it's nothing but hotels." But Miss Miller did not make this remark with a querulous accent; she appeared to be in the best humor with everything. She declared that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet. She was not disappointed--not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had heard so much about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress she felt as if she were in Europe.
"It was a kind of a wishing cap," said Winterbourne.
"Yes," said Miss Miller without examining this analogy; "it always made me wish I was here. But I
ly no warrant but its splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the impudence is always there--there, so to speak, for grace and effect and ALLURE; there, above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art, and because, as we are always disappointed when the pampered don't "play up," we like it, to that extent, to look all its character. It probably does so, in truth, even when we most flatter ourselves that we negotiate with it by treaty.
All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance--an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had I been in fact too stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none the less, as the links multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for the determination of poor Strether's errand and for the apprehension of his issue. These things continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched his head about the
e in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self- conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave--the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, for the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that here immediately is a prime specimen of the way in which the obscurer, the lurking relations of a motive apparently simple, always in wait for their spring, may by seizing their chance for it send simplicity flying. Poor Nanda's little case, and her mother's, and Mr. Longdon's and Vanderbank's and Mitchy's, to say nothing of that of the others, has only to catch a reflected light from over the Channel in order to double at once its appeal to the imagination. (I am considering all these matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that faculty. With a relation NOT imaginative to his
Description
The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the most well-received of Henry James’s novels. First published in 1902, it follows Kate Croy and Merton Densher, an engaged couple in late-Victorian London, who meet Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress.
Milly, though young and lively, is burdened with a fatal disease. She wishes to spend her last days on happy adventures through Europe, and her sparkling personality, still bright despite her looming death, quickly makes her a hit in the London social scene. As she plans an excursion to Venice, Kate and Merton, who are too poor to marry and still maintain their social standing, scheme to trick Milly out of her inheritance.
The character of Milly is partly based on Minny Temple, James’ cousin who died young of tuberculosis. He later wrote that the novel was his attempt to immortalize her memory, and that he spent years developing the core of the book’s conceit before committing it to the page. The novel is James at his peak: dizzyingly complex prose weaves rich, impressionistic character studies, heavy in symbolism and allusion, amid the glamorous backdrops of high-society London and decaying Venetian grandeur.
Description
One of the most famous ghost stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw earned its place in the annals of influential English novellas not for its qualities as a gothic ghost story, but rather for the many complex and subtle ways the reader can come to opposing conclusions as to tale’s very nature. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they figments of her quiet insanity?
The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serial, and later went through many revisions by James himself. Though there aren’t any overt suggestion that James intended his novella to be anything but a simple ghost story, the ambiguity in the narrative has captured the imagination of generations of readers and critics.
rents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at Boulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not so vulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her.
"She knows what I think of them," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed she knows what I think of most things."
"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I replied laughing.
"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little difference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of all what I think of Flor
tel isn't much; but the piano is better thanthat fearful old thing at the Sebago House. Sometimes I godownstairs and talk to the lady who keeps the books--a French lady,who is remarkably polite. She is very pretty, and always wears ablack dress, with the most beautiful fit; she speaks a littleEnglish; she tells me she had to learn it in order to converse withthe Americans who come in such numbers to this hotel. She has givenme a great deal of information about the position of woman in France,and much of it is very encouraging. But she has told me at the sametime some things that I should not like to write to you (I amhesitating even about putting them into my journal), especially if myletters are to be handed round in the family. I assure you theyappear to talk about things here that we never think of mentioning atBangor, or even of thinking about. She seems to think she can tellme everything, because I told her I was travelling for generalculture. Well, I DO want to know so much that it
daub on the easel.
"Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French."
"To learn French?"
"To take lessons."
"To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?"
"From you!"
"From me, my child? How should I give lessons?"
"Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!" said Mademoiselle Noemie, with soft brevity.
M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter's eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. "Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language?" he inquired, with an appealing quaver.
"To study French?" asked Newman, staring.
M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. "A little conversation!"
"Conversation--that's it!" murmured Mademoiselle Noemie, who had caught the word. "The conversation of the best society."
"Our French conversation is famous, you know," M. Nioche ventured to continue. "It's a great talent."
"But
than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just as there had been an impression that he had "served," as the London populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many co
heir accompaniments, were for about five years a source of extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted and a very happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest patrimony which on his father's death he had shared with his brothers and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money- -it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth that if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he could be, that a doctor he persis
ticular, the various hotels at which they had stopped. "That English lady in the cars," she said--"Miss Featherstone-- asked me if we didn't all live in hotels in America. I told her I had never been in so many hotels in my life as since I came to Europe. I have never seen so many--it's nothing but hotels." But Miss Miller did not make this remark with a querulous accent; she appeared to be in the best humor with everything. She declared that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet. She was not disappointed--not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had heard so much about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress she felt as if she were in Europe.
"It was a kind of a wishing cap," said Winterbourne.
"Yes," said Miss Miller without examining this analogy; "it always made me wish I was here. But I
ly no warrant but its splendid impudence. Let us grant then that the impudence is always there--there, so to speak, for grace and effect and ALLURE; there, above all, because the Story is just the spoiled child of art, and because, as we are always disappointed when the pampered don't "play up," we like it, to that extent, to look all its character. It probably does so, in truth, even when we most flatter ourselves that we negotiate with it by treaty.
All of which, again, is but to say that the STEPS, for my fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance--an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had I been in fact too stupid for my clue. Never, positively, none the less, as the links multiplied, had I felt less stupid than for the determination of poor Strether's errand and for the apprehension of his issue. These things continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched his head about the
e in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self- conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave--the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, for the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that here immediately is a prime specimen of the way in which the obscurer, the lurking relations of a motive apparently simple, always in wait for their spring, may by seizing their chance for it send simplicity flying. Poor Nanda's little case, and her mother's, and Mr. Longdon's and Vanderbank's and Mitchy's, to say nothing of that of the others, has only to catch a reflected light from over the Channel in order to double at once its appeal to the imagination. (I am considering all these matters, I need scarce say, only as they are concerned with that faculty. With a relation NOT imaginative to his
Description
The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the most well-received of Henry James’s novels. First published in 1902, it follows Kate Croy and Merton Densher, an engaged couple in late-Victorian London, who meet Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress.
Milly, though young and lively, is burdened with a fatal disease. She wishes to spend her last days on happy adventures through Europe, and her sparkling personality, still bright despite her looming death, quickly makes her a hit in the London social scene. As she plans an excursion to Venice, Kate and Merton, who are too poor to marry and still maintain their social standing, scheme to trick Milly out of her inheritance.
The character of Milly is partly based on Minny Temple, James’ cousin who died young of tuberculosis. He later wrote that the novel was his attempt to immortalize her memory, and that he spent years developing the core of the book’s conceit before committing it to the page. The novel is James at his peak: dizzyingly complex prose weaves rich, impressionistic character studies, heavy in symbolism and allusion, amid the glamorous backdrops of high-society London and decaying Venetian grandeur.