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Type of bind: Perfect Paperback
EAN num: 9781580491617
ISBN number: 1580491618
Label: Prestwick House, Ltd.
Manufacturer: Prestwick House, Ltd.
Page Count: 142
Printing Date: September 01, 2006
Publishing house: Prestwick House, Ltd.
Release Date: October 01, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 19140
Studio: Prestwick House, Ltd.
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader more fully appreciate the rich complexity of James' language, images, and symbols. Before there was Alfred Hitchcock, there was Henry James, and before Psycho, there was The Turn of the Screw. Why is the young governess the only one who can see the ghosts? Are her young charges haunted or evil? Or is the governess herself mad? The book that claims to start out as a Christmas Eve ghost story quickly becomes a tale of psychological horror as the governess struggles-and ultimately fails-to protect the children from the 'corruption' that only she can conceive of...but cannot name. Richly wrought in Late-Victorian prose, Henry James' most famous novel is both hauntingly beautiful and a shocking glimpse into the ultimate source of evil...the human mind.
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Rated by buyers 
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This edition provides provacative notes to assist the reader who is not accustomed to the gothic romance genre. Various critical theories are proposed which stimulate attentive reading. My own reading would lean towards the notion that James is satirizing popular horror stories, while at the same time taking jabs at readers who absorb them. In any case, the novella provokes interesting discussion.
Rated by buyers 
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This is the last time that I let Gil Grissom recommend a book for me. Yes, I let a fictional character from a TV show pick a book for me to read. The story is a fairly simple and uninspired Gothic "horror" story. There are some ghosts who never really do anything and a governess who overreacts to everything. The idea that perhaps the governess is insane and this isn't a simple horror story, in my opinion comes from the fact that it is impossible to justify reading this story without that conundrum.
Besides the plot being rather pedestrian is the writing of Henry James. He uses sentences that are confused, confusing, and in many places indecipherable. At 120 pages, the book is probably 100 pages too long. Some examples:
"Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill that we vociferously denied we felt; and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements."
"But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house that I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the very first birds began to twitter, for the possible recourse of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard."
These were sentences randomly pulled from the book and are a fair representation of the writing style of Henry James. The main part of the story is supposed to be written by the governess so one might try to argue that James is trying to capture something of the governess in this style but the introduction is virtually identical and is not written by the governess. Even the end of the story lacks completion as it leaves the entire tale unresolved. There is nothing to recommend this story for personal reading (other than being able to say you read it) and if it is required reading, at least getting through promises a grade at the end.
As far as this edition of the book, it is fairly well done with a glossary in the back to explain some difficult words and phrases and a points for discusion section at the front. But with such a difficult book, I think most students would appreciate more discusion of the book in a general way and perhaps even a brief description of the action of each chapter. The book itself I would rate rather poor and this edition I would rate as fair. Overall, three stars is a generous review.
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