The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels Quotes

“I don’t see why I should regard what is done here,” said Bessie Alden. “Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none of the privileges?”
― Henry James, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels

“The Turn of the Screw” has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.”
― Henry James, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels

“There is nothing, though, in “An International Episode” or “Daisy Miller,” fine as they are, that prepares us for the subtle psychological realism of James’s depictions of the elusiveness of self-knowledge and the terrors of confronting one’s concealed motivations in the three premier stories of this volume, “The Aspern Papers,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” Beginning in the 1880s with Portrait of a Lady (1881), which literary historians tend to think of as James’s breakthrough novel, the fate of Americans in Europe and the interaction between European sophistication and American innocence became more a matter of the heart and psyche than one of manners, social relations, and cultural differences.”
― Henry James, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels

“There were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a connection more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life.”
― Henry James, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels

“nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess’s plight;”
― Henry James, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels