Customer Reviews

The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller

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This Dell paperback performs a nice bit of service by giving you a pair of Henry James' most significant works: "The Turn Of The Screw," the famous ghost-story novella for which he is best-known today; and "Daisy Miller," another novella that was James' most successful in his lifetime.

I only wish I had enjoyed them. James' style, as I found it, tends to be rather opaque, high-toned, and enervated; smothered in adjectives and lacking in verbs. Fiction-writing from his period can be distant and formal-sounding, but James' feels lost to time in a way others like Conrad and Twain are not.

I probably had the wrong mindset approaching "Turn Of The Screw." This is a famous horror story, read by middle-schoolers. How much of a chore would it be?

Plenty. James frames his story by introducing us to a group of high-toned characters, none of whom we will see again as one of them tells about a story "beyond everything. Nothing I know touches it...for dreadfulness!"

I found this to be true, actually, though not the way James intended. After these few pages of meandering exposition, we meet an unnamed woman hired to be a governess of two cute little kids residing in a pretty English country manor. Various things start to happen to convince the woman that the children are communing with a pair of nasty specters.

Nice idea, but James presents it, intentionally or otherwise, so vaguely that the story loses any real foreboding or suspense. When ghosts appear, they stand on parapets or stare through windows, eyes haunting but the rest of them pretty much inert. Not even the shake of a chain. You never really know anyone in the story; not the kids, cardboard cuties who seem to drift though the narrative chirping noxious Edwardian pleasantries; and not the governess, who sticks by her creepy assignment because she has fallen in love with their uncle, a rich weirdo who requires no matter what happens to the tykes, he never be bothered about them. I guess a good man was hard to find back then.

The end of the book loses a lot of people, but in such a way to make it a favorite of critics. Did the story really happen as presented, or did the governess flip? It's easier to go on about subtext this way when there's so little to the actual text.

"Daisy Miller" is a better tale, crisper and more involving. It's about social mores, and how a young American woman in Europe falls afoul of them. Actually, I thought the story was about a young man who meets an enchanting but impossible flirt, and the way it distends his view of himself and the world around him. But it turns out I was wrong, according to the literary criticism I found online. It's about the girl, and she's not a minx the way I thought, but a truehearted innocent who suffers from the snobby Continentals.

Man, I'm really glad they didn't stick me with this in middle school. "Daisy Miller" left me confused again, and flat, but I did enjoy it until I discovered I was reading a whole different story from what the author wrote. Darn you James, you narrative trickster you!

Jennifer, period 3

This is a review on The turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller by
Henry James. The turn of the Screw is a haunting ghost story of this woman that is a governess and moves into an old English mansion to care for two children Miles, and Flora. The governess start seeing things and she realizes that these people are not human but ghosts and she thinks that they are going to possess the children. This short novel is a horrifying classic ghost story that was actually not bad. The short novel of Daisy Miller is a tale of a governess on vacation with her family in Italy and she falls in deeply in love with her employer. This is a sad love story that Henry makes you use your imagination on. She is swept off her feet by her employer, Frederick Forsyth. But his suspicions about her friendship with an Italian man lead him, and the rest of society, to abandon her. Only after she is dead that he realizes her actions were spontaneous and out of generosity. That is my review on these short novels by Henry James.