The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is considered among the best ghost stories ever written in English. It was published in serial form in Collier's Magazine in 1898, but written in 1897-1898 when James had moved to Rye in Sussex, a quaint and picturesque small English town.
The story has been filmed and adapted many times, most lately in the 2020 Netflix series 'The Haunting of Bly Manor'. The story concerns a governess who is sent to look after two beautiful children at a remote house in the English countryside. What she experiences there is never fully explained: is she haunted or is she mad?
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York but moved to live in London, where he died in 1916. James is an enormously influential figure in American literature. He wrote several very well-reviewed novels, for example, The Portrait of a Lady, but also The Bostonians, The Ambassadors and The Wings of a Dove.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916.
James turned his hand to ghost stories, which of course were all the rage at the end of the 19th Century. The Turn of the Screw is considered by some, even many, as the best ghost story ever written.
