It was the fashion of the day to tell frightening ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Rather, he was more interested in real ghosts, "the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy," as he put it in the preface to the New York Edition of his final ghost story, The Jolly Corner.īeing a popular form in England and America, James had written ghost stories before The Turn of the Screw. He was not attracted to those ghosts who appear in white sheets frightening those around.
James's interest, however, was not in the stereotypical ghost stories. James wrote The Turn of the Screw at a time when there was a prevalent fondness for ghost stories. Some critics, therefore, picture him as a repressed or clandestine homosexual. Throughout his biography there is no mention of him getting married or even being involved in any romantic encounters. He was a reserved person who loved to keep his distance from people. In these chilling stories, Henry James shows himself to be a master of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension.In actual life Henry James (1843-1916) was reported to be a loner despite the many friends around him. But is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence or something else entirely? This collection also includes The Jolly Corner, Owen Wingrave, and further tales of visitations, premonitions, madness, grief, and family secrets, where the living are just as mysterious and unknowable as the dead. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. James's haunting masterpiece tells of a nameless young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora.
This unsettling collection brings together eight of Henry James's tales exploring ghosts and the uncanny, including his infamous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, a work saturated with evil. Is now a feature film from Universal Pictures premiering January 24th, produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Finn Wolfhard and Mackenzie Davis One of the greatest ghost stories ever told,
0 kommentar(er)
