The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels

Table of Contents


About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction


AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

DAISY MILLER: A STUDY - IN TWO PARTS

THE ASPERN PAPERS

THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE


Selected Bibliography

A Note on the Text

Henry James (1843-1916) spent his early life in America, but often traveled with his celebrated family to Europe. After briefly attending Harvard, he began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines. Later, he visited Europe and began Roderick Hudson. Late in 1875, he settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola and wrote The American. In 1876, he moved to London, where two years later he achieved international fame with Daisy Miller. His other famous works include The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In 1915, a few months before his death, he became a British subject.


A biographer and literary scholar, Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Singular Mark Twain, A Biography (2003); Gore Vidal, A Biography (1999); Henry James, The Imagination of Genius, A Biography (1992); and Charles Dickens, A Biography (1988). His Thomas Carlyle, A Biography (1983), was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was a jury-nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has edited Dickens’ Book of Memoranda (1981), the Norton Critical Editions of Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1993) and Hard Times (2001), and Traveling in Italy with Henry James (1994). His other works include Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (1987), Dickens and Mesmerism: the Hidden Springs of Fiction (1975), and Miracles of Rare Device: The Poet’s Sense of Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1972). He has held Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and been a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio.

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Introduction

The tales included in this edition are among Henry James’s most powerful and cryptic stories, and they share the theme of an exploration of tombs, especially the dead spots locked within the heart. Written over a thirty-year period, they represent the flower of his career as a writer of short fiction, which began soon after the end of the Civil War. In the 1870s, James was looking for an artistically propitious venue; convinced that the United States lacked the cultural richness required to nurture serious literature, he turned his attention as a writer and traveler to Europe and to what became known as the ‘‘international theme.’’ This phrase mainly referred to English-American interactions and attitudes, but it also meant an immersion in the Continental literary tradition, particularly the major French writers, such as Balzac and Maupassant. The synthesis of French literary influences, especially its short story and short novel tradition, with the rich distinctiveness of English culture and James’s American sensibility provides the deep background to the tales in this volume and to all James’s fiction.

‘‘An International Episode’’ and ‘‘Daisy Miller: A Study’’ (both 1878) epitomize James’s treatment of the international theme. They are also farewells to what had been his sociological treatment of the subject that dominated his first two novels, Roderick Hudson (1875) and The American (1877). In ‘‘An International Episode,’’ James divides the focus of the story between two upper-classEnglishmen in America and two upper-class but comparatively classless American women in England, cleverly providing for contrast within each pair. The emphasis is on cultural differences rather than on individual personalities; the characters are national types, chess pieces moved about on the authorial chessboard for the purpose of highlighting differences in values that are substantially determined by national identity. In the end, Bessie Alden, an exemplification of American probity and independence, rejects Lord Lambeth, whom she loves, because she will not submit to being condescended to by his family, who embody English adherence to social rank and hierarchical deference. The story is stingingly realistic in regard to social and class-based realities, and the author manages the story’s best effects by limiting the depiction of the thoughts and feelings of its characters to external description and dialogue.

‘‘Daisy Miller: A Study’’ has the advantage of having its focus narrowed even further. The point of view of this third-person narrative is restricted almost entirely to that of a single character, an American expatriate named Winterbourne. Its variation on the ‘‘international theme’’ provides a half turn away from the comparative focus of ‘‘An International Episode,’’ by emphasizing the dissonance between a naive American girl and a range of disapproving Americans who are, in order of importance to poor Daisy, ineffectual, censorious, and ambivalent. It is Winterbourne who is the latter, and the centrality of his sensibility to the story inches ‘‘Daisy Miller’’ toward the psychological realism of James’s later stories. It is Winterbourne, not Daisy, to whom the subtitle of the story refers. Aware that the innocent and fun-loving Daisy is committing dangerous improprieties that are acceptable neither to Europeans nor Americans, Winterbourne so fears commitment that he remains more an observer than a participant in her fate. In the end, it is Winterbourne himself who is the main character of the story: a sexually ambivalent, emotionally well-defended, deracinated American who most of all fears making a mistake.