This premium quality large print volume includes the complete text of Henry James' classic tale of mystery and suspense in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition.

With a large 6"x9" page size, this large print edition is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers and modern design and page layout exemplify the attention to detail given this volume.

The Turn of the Screw, a novella-length work first published together with another story in 1898 in a volume titled The Two Magics, is Henry James' best-known work today. A haunting tale about ghosts and the struggle for the souls of two children, with Gothic atmospherics, including old and mysterious buildings and the use of light and darkness in setting moods for certain scenes, the work displays some of James' characteristic and innovative style and method.

The tale opens as a classic frame story, with a character called "Douglas" reading a manuscript containing the main story to a group of friends, including the unnamed narrator. The framing story, however, is never revisited, and the novella simply ends at the conclusion of the manuscript. The ambiguities inherent in the work contributed to its embrace by the literary establishment, with the veracity of "Douglas" and the narrator, the mental state of "the governess", the specific nature of the "evil", and the actual nature of the various events open to question and interpretation.

James' innovative use of point of view, interior monologue and narrators of doubtful reliability in his own novels and stories heavily influenced subsequent writers of narrative fiction and gave rise to lengthy and sometimes acrimonious debate among critics and academics about the interpretation of his works. The Turn of the Screw, for example, is subject to two mutually exclusive interpretations: some have seen it as a macabre ghost story, with its roots in gothic fiction, about the efforts of a governess to save two children from malevolent ghosts, while others have held that it is a sort of psychological drama about an insane governess who creates ghosts in her own mind to justify her feelings and actions.

But while James is known to have loved a good ghost story and perhaps most likely intended this as exactly what it appears to be at first blush, a horror story meant to make your skin crawl, he clearly also intentionally constructed the story laden with ambiguity and obscurity and it is for each reader to enjoy the tale and decide for himself or herself what really happened.

Henry James (1843-1916) was an American writer, sometimes mistakenly identified as a British writer because he spent most of his life in Britain. Considered a key figure in the 19th century literary realism movement, he was the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and noted diarist Alice James. He lived alternately between America and Europe as a young man before settling England and becoming a British subject in 1915. James frequently structured his work so that the story is told from the point of view of a character within the tale, allowing him to explore issues related to consciousness and human perception.