Ben's review
The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller
by Henry James
Ben's review
The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller by Henry James
Ben's review
rating:
These two fit together nicely. (I had never read either.) Both center on a single consciousness (the governess, Winterbourne) whose intelligence and discrimination first win our trust, and then threaten to lose it as the action advances and their judgment does not.
The Turn of the Screw was a revelation and I raced through it -- wonderfully unsettling -- more raw feels than I've gotten in a long time. (You root for the ghosts, but a second reading would probably show not only that the question is undecidable, but that the novella is about this ambiguity. Oh well.) Daisy Miller is not a revelation; it's just more parlor talk on the Grand Tour. Still, I was completely taken in by Winterbourne and reading up on the novella afterward (I had listened to it on tape) I was almost ashamed at how much I had missed. That was the revelation.
If you like both of these, I highly highly recommend an article on the idea of evil in Henry James that appears in his Cambridge Co...more
The Turn of the Screw was a revelation and I raced through it -- wonderfully unsettling -- more raw feels than I've gotten in a long time. (You root for the ghosts, but a second reading would probably show not only that the question is undecidable, but that the novella is about this ambiguity. Oh well.) Daisy Miller is not a revelation; it's just more parlor talk on the Grand Tour. Still, I was completely taken in by Winterbourne and reading up on the novella afterward (I had listened to it on tape) I was almost ashamed at how much I had missed. That was the revelation.
If you like both of these, I highly highly recommend an article on the idea of evil in Henry James that appears in his Cambridge Co...more
