The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw

The two tales in this edition, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw, reveal at its finest James's genius for creating a world out of a single incident and charging it with unforgettable dramatic tension.

A story of 'spoils and stratagems,' The Aspern Papers is set in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, where an old woman treasures up some letters sent to her by the great American poet Aspern. When a zealous literary historian arrives and attempts to prise the letters from her, he finds his charm, ingenuity and moral stretched to the breaking point.

'It is a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale,' wrote Oscar Wilde of The Turn of the Screw, James's most puzzling and controversial work. In the story of a governess newly in charge of two small children, haunted by ghosts, our imagination is miraculously set free to conjure up terrors never precisely named, or explained.