The Turn of the Screw by Henry James*

Reading Dates: 26 October – 2 December 2013

Frankly, I found Henry James’ prose unbearable, the story inconsequential — more confusing that eerie – and the characters, despite the winks to my favourite topic of hysterical women, rather unbelievable, although the sentences in these 160 really annoying pages made me learn to control my breath as Neil and I read the whole book aloud to each other, thinking as we did that it would fit Halloween and not knowing that our reading would be so extended beyond the holiday of the dead.

Writing Jamesian sentences is hard and, I must say, the effort does not pay of.