Henry James and the Making of the Story
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843 into a wealthy, intellectually restless family. His father was an unconventional religious philosopher; his brother William became the most influential American psychologist of the nineteenth century. James spent much of his adult life in Europe, settling permanently in England in 1876 and eventually becoming a British citizen in 1915, the year before his death. By the time he wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1897–1898, he was in his mid-fifties, a celebrated but commercially struggling novelist whose attempt to conquer the London stage had ended in public humiliation when the audience booed Guy Domville off the stage in 1895. That failure drove him back to fiction with renewed intensity and a new willingness to experiment with psychological extremity.
The seed of the tale came directly from an anecdote. On 12 January 1895, a week after the Guy Domville disaster, James recorded in his notebook a story told to him by Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury: a half-remembered account of a country house, a dead servant, and children corrupted by ghostly contact. James noted the germ carefully, returned to it two years later, and expanded it into the novella serialised in Collier's Weekly from January to April 1898, then published in book form the same year alongside other tales under the title The Two Magics.
The Victorian Governess
The social position of the governess was one of the most precarious in Victorian England, and James exploits its tensions throughout the narrative. Educated above the servant class yet employed within it, the governess occupied an ambiguous middle ground: she was expected to be genteel enough to instruct the children of wealthy families in languages, music, and deportment, yet she had no independent income, no professional standing, and no social protection if she lost her post. The governess in the story is explicitly the daughter of a country parson—a background that signals respectable poverty and limited worldly experience, making her susceptibility to the charm of her wealthy, handsome employer entirely plausible to a Victorian reader.
The 1840s and 1850s had seen intense public debate about the governess's plight. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) had both placed governesses at the centre of their narratives, and the Governesses' Benevolent Institution, founded in 1843, existed precisely because so many educated women ended their working lives in destitution. By 1898 the figure of the governess was thus already heavily freighted with cultural anxiety about class, female dependence, and the vulnerability of women in isolated domestic settings. James inherits all of this freight and turns it to psychological purpose: the governess's social isolation at Bly is not incidental atmosphere but a structural condition that makes her testimony impossible to verify and her authority impossible to establish.
Servants, Class, and the Country House
The rigid hierarchy of the Victorian country house is essential to understanding the relationships James depicts. Peter Quint's transgression is not simply moral but social: a valet who assumes the authority of a gentleman, who wears his master's clothes, who moves freely through the house and grounds as though rank does not apply to him. Mrs. Grose's horror at Quint is inseparable from her horror at his presumption. Similarly, Miss Jessel's relationship with Quint crosses a class line—a gentlewoman consorting with a manservant—that Victorian readers would have found as scandalous as any supernatural element. James never describes the nature of either relationship explicitly; he relies on his readers' social knowledge to supply the outrage that Mrs. Grose can only hint at.
The guardian's arrangement—leaving two young orphaned children in the care of a new, inexperienced governess with strict instructions never to be disturbed—also reflects a recognisable Victorian reality. Wealthy bachelors with inconvenient dependants routinely delegated their care entirely to hired staff. The uncle's absence from Bly is not a Gothic contrivance but a socially credible arrangement, which is precisely what makes the governess's isolation so complete and so dangerous.
Psychology, the Supernatural, and the 1890s
The 1890s were a decade of intense popular and scientific interest in the boundary between the rational and the irrational. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, was conducting systematic investigations into telepathy, apparitions, and mediumship; William James was among its American members. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published Studies on Hysteria in 1895, introducing to a wider audience the idea that psychological disturbance could produce vivid, apparently external perceptions. Henry James was aware of both currents. The question the novella refuses to settle—whether the governess genuinely sees ghosts or is suffering a form of psychological breakdown—was not merely a literary game in 1898; it mapped directly onto live debates about the nature of perception, repression, and female nervous illness that James's own brother was helping to shape.
The framing device of the manuscript read aloud on Christmas Eve also draws on a genuine Victorian custom. Ghost stories at Christmas were a well-established seasonal tradition, associated above all with Charles Dickens, and James's prologue places the tale self-consciously within that tradition before systematically undermining its comfortable conventions.
Timeline of Key Contexts
- 1843 — Henry James born in New York City; Governesses' Benevolent Institution founded in London.
- 1847 — Charlotte Brontë publishes Jane Eyre, establishing the governess as a central figure in English fiction.
- 1876 — James settles permanently in England.
- 1882 — Society for Psychical Research founded in London.
- 1895 — Guy Domville booed at the St James's Theatre; Archbishop Benson tells James the anecdote that becomes the story's germ; Freud and Breuer publish Studies on Hysteria.
- 1897 — James writes The Turn of the Screw in London in the autumn, dictating it to a typist; the same year he takes the lease on Lamb House, Rye.
- January–April 1898 — The novella serialised in Collier's Weekly.
- October 1898 — Published in volume form as part of The Two Magics.
- 1916 — Henry James dies in London.
What James Shapes and What He Leaves Out
James compresses and stylises his sources freely. The Archbishop's anecdote was vague and incomplete; James invented the governess's narrating voice, the manuscript frame, the specific social textures of Bly, and above all the radical ambiguity that makes the story endure. He also strips away any reassuring resolution: where the Victorian ghost story conventionally explains and dispels its supernatural threat, James closes with a dead child and no explanation. Readers should treat the novella not as a document of Victorian country-house life but as a deliberate, highly crafted distortion of it—one that uses the period's social anxieties about class, gender, and psychological instability as the raw material for something altogether more unsettling.