Works · Novella · 1898

The Turn of the Screw

First appeared 27 Jan 1898 in Collier's Weekly

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

At a country house on Christmas Eve, a guest called Douglas reads aloud the manuscript of a governess long dead. Hired by a charming bachelor guardian who refuses to be troubled, she takes charge of two orphans, Flora and Miles, at his estate of Bly in Essex. Miles is expelled from school for reasons nobody will state. The governess begins to see a man on the tower and a woman by the lake, and learns from the housekeeper Mrs Grose that they resemble two servants who have died. Whether the dead truly return, and what they want from the children, is left for the reader to judge.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted.

Chapter III. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #209 (Gutenberg text, which is the book (1898) text, not the Collier’s serial and not the 1908 New York Edition revision)

The publication record

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

Novella

Serial 27 Jan 1898 Collier's Weekly New York Weekly instalments; Part First opens in the issue dated New York, January 27, 1898 (Vol. 20, No. 17), and later parts appear in the issues of 12 March and 19 March 1898. The end date is not established by an authoritative source. An Eric Pape illustration is dated 5 March 1898 in the Beinecke-held item. [1][2]
Volume 1898 The Macmillan Company (New York); William Heinemann (London), New York and London First book appearance, in The Two Magics with ‘Covering End’. The Gutenberg title page reads ‘New York, The Macmillan Company; London, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1898’; the Internet Archive record describes a Heinemann 1898 ‘First English edition’. Only the year is established. [3][4]

Collier's Weekly 27 Jan 1898 illustration John La Farge (1835-1910), 1898-01-27. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry James, 1843–1916. The Turn of the Screw first appeared when Henry James was 54.

Facts

The title phrase belongs to the frame story: after one guest says a child makes a ghost story creepier, the guest Douglas remarks that if a child gives the effect another turn of the screw, one may ask what two children would do; the manuscript he then reads is the answer (Prologue, where the Gutenberg text italicises ‘two’).[5]
The tale first ran in 1898 in Collier’s Weekly, illustrated by Eric Pape, who made five images for the serial (one, of the governess meeting the ghost of Miss Jessel, is dated 5 March 1898 and is held at the Beinecke Library, Yale); it reached book form later that year in The Two Magics, alongside the short story ‘Covering End’.[2][3][4]
The governess herself reaches for Gothic precedent: in the fourth chapter she asks whether Bly hides ‘a mystery of Udolpho’ or an ‘insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement’.[5]

Setting

A mid-Victorian past, told on a Christmas Eve by a frame narrator[5]

Bly, a country house in Essex
London (Harley Street)

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution

Serial dates: Part First is in Collier’s Weekly of 27 January 1898 (issue scan); the end date is not established, so none is shown.
Publisher of the book: the Gutenberg title page of The Two Magics names Macmillan (New York and London); the Internet Archive record describes a Heinemann ‘First English edition’. Only the year is shown.

Threads

Threads in

Descends from The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794
The governess explicitly asks whether she has stumbled on ‘a mystery of Udolpho’ at Bly (Chapter IV), marking the story’s debt to the Radcliffean secret-in-the-house plot.[5]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1898, and the other writers alive when The Turn of the Screw appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).