The Turn of the Screw

A young governess takes charge of two orphaned children at Bly, a remote English country house, on the strict condition that she never trouble their guardian uncle with any difficulty. Soon she begins to see figures on the grounds she cannot explain, and grows convinced that the ghosts of two dead servants are reaching for the children she is meant to protect. Henry James keeps the truth deliberately uncertain: the reader is never sure whether Bly is genuinely haunted or whether the governess is unraveling and endangering the children herself. That ambiguity has made the novella one of the most argued-over ghost stories ever written, a masterclass in dread built from suggestion rather than shock. Free PDF and EPUB edition.