Reading Groups

In Short: Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" with Sheridan Hay

$50

Includes a Complimentary Drink from Our Café & Bar

Out of stock

Thursday, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT October 31, 2024

The Center for Fiction

This single-session group is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Registration includes a complimentary drink from our Café & Bar.

Exactly how frightening is Henry James’s most popular ghostly short story, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)? Find out on Halloween night in a discussion of this classic Gothic horror.

A governess is dispatched by a bachelor uncle to a remote pile in the English countryside where she will be responsible for two young children: Miles, aged 10, and his sister Flora, 8. The children are beautiful, charming, and angelic, but as an idyllic summer ends, visitations from malevolent spirits—debauched former servants—begin. Are these spirits actually “corrupting” the children—and if so, how? What exactly is the particular horror and mystery at the heart of James’s fable of innocence and corruption? Is it psychological? Supernatural? Is “The Turn of the Screw” a ghost story or a depiction of pathological hallucination? Is the governess hysterical or the protector of innocence? Is “The Turn of the Screw” a moral parable of the battle between good and evil that confronts even the most blameless soul?

The exhilarating thrill of this tale is in its mastery of James’s vaunted ambiguity, making it, perhaps, the most ambiguous story in the Jamesian canon. For Virginia Woolf, “the horror of [this] story comes from the force with which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untraced desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.” Interpretations are legion and you, the reader, will have your own. Join us—and don’t be scared when each turn of the screw brings us closer and closer to the fathomless depths of Jamesian imagination.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read Henry James’s “The Turn of The Screw” in its entirety.

What to expect from this reading group: This 90-minute session will begin with an overview of the historical, biographical, and literary context of the novella. A group discussion, in which we turn to the text to cite specific examples and respond to questions and comments, will follow.

Capacity: 25

Led by

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), which features a lost novel by Herman Melville, was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impac Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, foreign rights have been sold in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led The Center’s Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as the popular Henry James group.

About this series

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