"Cliff Notes - Daisy Miller" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

housekeeper; sister and brother (named Miles) victimized by
horrors; and a villainous valet named Peter Quint. He called
his tale The Turn of the Screw.

James's interest in the supernatural was strong, and it figured
in a number of his stories of the 1890s. Yet The Turn of the
Screw seemed to tap something particularly deep in his emotions.
As he was writing about the country house, Bly, he was preparing
to move into a similar country estate, Lamb House. Describing
the complicated feelings James had for Lamb House, his
biographer, Leon Edel, wrote: "The house symbolized the world
of his childhood, the place where he had been least free, where
he had had to resort to disguise and subterfuge in order to
possess himself and his identity." There are other connections
between the story and James's own life. Like Miles's childhood,
James's was spent in the company of women. His own boyhood
governess was let go from the family's employ, "a cloud of
revelations succeeding her withdrawal." Perhaps it was on this
character in his own past that he based Miss Jessel.

When The Turn of the Screw appeared in installments in Collier's
Weekly in 1898, James was flooded with letters from readers who
were eager to have the story's mystery solved for them. Not
since the publication of Daisy Miller twenty years earlier had
he produced a work that evoked such a response from the public.
James teased his readers by calling the story "a trap for the
unwary," but never explained the mystery. And in some ways the
mystery has deepened since. In 1934 the noted American critic
Edmund Wilson wrote that the ghosts the governess supposedly
sees in the tale aren't real at all, but instead are merely
figments of her troubled imagination. In his view, and in the
view of many other critics, The Turn of the Screw is not really
a ghost story but rather a study of a deeply disturbed mind.
Are the ghosts real or not? Is the governess sane or not? It's
in part because of these ambiguities that The Turn of the Screw
is regarded not merely as a fine tale of the supernatural but as
one of the finest stories--of any category--in world
literature.

After the turn of the century, James produced in quick
succession two studies of adultery which are perhaps his
greatest novels: The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl
(1904). This flurry of activity was followed from 1907 to 1909
by the issue of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York
Edition, a multivolume collection for which James made many
revisions in his work. The prefaces he wrote for this edition,
according to Leon Edel, gave James a chance "to say what he
hoped all his life the critics would say for him." Taken
together, these prefaces constitute his theory of the novel.