First Impressions: The Turn Of The Screw, by Henry James (1898)

Coming immediately on the heels, as one may say, of his painfully elaborate treatment of an almost worthless subject in a story called In the Cage, this still newer volume by Mr James is doubly surprising and gratifying. We should not care, certainly, to recommend it offhand as agreeable reading for habitually light-hearted or light-minded persons, though to be sure the second of the two stories is a perfect example of pure comedy, worthy of Meredith, buoyantly uplifting, rich in humorous fancy, both exquisite and of seeming spontaneity in its play of wit.

Preceding it, in the longer tale called, The Turn of the Screw, is such a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil, of the subtle influence over human hearts and minds of the sin with which this world is accursed, as our language has not produced since Stevenson wrote his Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde tale.

Mr James's story is perhaps as allegorical as Stevenson's, but the allegory is not so clear. We have called it "horribly successful", and the phrase seems to still stand, on second thought, to express the awful, overpowering sense of the evil that human nature is subject to.... We have no doubt that with such a reader Mr James will invariably produce exactly the effect he aims at. But the work is not horrible in any grotesque or "realistic" sense. The strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature... it is nevertheless free from the slightest hint of grossness. Of any precise form of evil Mr James says very little.... Yet, while the substance of his story is free from all impurity and the manner is always graceful and scrupulously polite, the very breath of hell seems to pervade some of its chapters, and in the outcome goodness, though depicted as alert and militant, is scarcely triumphant. The most depraved "realist" could surely not be more powerful, though he might, in his explicitness, defeat his purpose. Mr James's purpose is amply fulfilled.

The New York Times