was originally published as a seria

was originally published as a serialized novel in Collier's Weekly. Robert J. Collier, whose father had founded the magazine, had just become editor. At the time, James was already a well-known author, having already published The Europeans, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and The Bostonians. Collier was hoping to increase his magazine's circulation and revenue and to improve its reputation by publishing the works of a serious, well-known author like James. James himself had just signed a long-term lease on a house in Sussex and needed the extra income to facilitate moving from his residence in London. Thus, James agreed to Collier's proposal that he write a twelve-part ghost story in 1897.

James finished The Turn of the Screw in November 1897, and the story was published in Collier's between January and April of 1898. The text of the story consisted of a prologue and twelve chapters in both the serialized publication and later book versions. In Collier's, the story was further divided into five "parts" and published in twelve installments.

James's agreement to publish his story in Collier's was done with the understanding that he would publish a book version as well. Heinemann in England and Macmillan in New York both published book versions of The Turn of the Screw, the text identical except that they lacked the five "parts" markings, in the fall of 1898. In 1908, James published his complete works in what is now known as "The New York Edition." The Turn of the Screw appeared in Volume 16, along with another novella, The Aspern Papers, and two short stories, "The Liar" and "The Two Faces."






The Turn of the Screw is a novella, which means that it is long story, shorter than a traditional novel but focusing on actions of greater scope than the short story. In James's 1908 publication of The Turn of the Screw, he made a very few emendations to his text - most of which are minor semantic and punctuation changes. One noteworthy thing that James changed in this edition is Flora's age. In the 1898 publication, Flora is six-years-old; in 1908, she becomes eight. This may simply have resulted from James's realization, after the first publication, that Flora speaks and acts as if she is older than six.

James wrote The Turn of the Screw at a time during which belief in ghosts and spirituality was very prevalent in England and America. The spirituality craze had begun in 1848 when the two young Fox sisters in New York heard unexplained rappings in their bedroom. They were able to ask questions and receive answers in raps from what they - and the many people who became aware of their case - believed was a dead person. That same year, a book about the "science" of ghosts, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers, by Catherine Crowe was published and became very popular.

The Society for Psychical Research, of which James's brother and father were members, was founded in 1882. It was an offshoot of the Cambridge Ghost Club, founded in 1851 at Trinity College at Cambridge University - where the prologue's Douglas was a student. Reading The Turn of the Screw, it is important to remember that despite twentieth-century skepticism towards ghosts and the paranormal, many educated nineteenth-century readers did believe in ghosts and spirituality.

On significant reason for the rise in spirituality's popularity in nineteenth-century is widespread disillusionment with traditional religion. Unable to believe in the all-powerful and benevolent Deity preached by the Christian church, many intellectuals of the day turned away from Christianity. James himself was acquainted with the Concord school of transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Because of the loss of Christian faith, traditionally a comfort to those who had lost loved ones or who faced death themselves, many people searched for a new way of understanding and accepting death. Spirituality was not limited to the scholarly studies of William James; many of its adherents sought solace in the possibility of communicating with dead family members and loved ones at seances - in reassuring themselves that there was an Other Side.

James, however, emphasizes in the Preface to his 1908 edition that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not ghosts as that term had come to be understood by the turn of the century. These ghosts, he says, now the subjects of laboratory study, cannot stir "the dear old sacred terror" as old-time ghost stories could. Modern ghosts make "poor subjects," and his ghosts, therefore, would be agents of evil - "goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft."

The content of James book comes from "real-life" ghostly encounters about which he had heard. In the preface, James speaks of being one of a group on a winter afternoon in an old country house - very much like the narrator of his prologue - when his host recalled the fragment of a tale told to him as a young man by a lady. She di