One of these was The Turn of the Screw, published in Collier’s Weekly between January and April 1898. There, he resigned himself to work he despised: Writing serials for magazines.

James, humiliated and short on cash, quit theater and soon moved to New York. “I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” the titular character exclaimed at the end, to which one disgruntled theatergoer allegedly very audibly responded, “It’s a bloody good thing y’are!” While most of his plays remained on paper only, Guy Domville did open in London in 1895. The royalties for James’s early novels were beginning to dry up by the 1890s, which prompted him to briefly pivot to playwriting. Henry James's main reason for writing The Turn of the Screw was because he needed money. But it seems probable that James spun his own story based on just a sentence or two in his preface to the novella, he wrote that their host only remembered a “shadow of a shadow” of the story, likening it to a “precious pinch … extracted from an old silver snuff-box and held between finger and thumb.” 2. James also jotted down that the story should be told “by an outside spectator.” Not only does the story itself follow the basic plot of The Turn of the Screw, but James’s own fireside experience mirrors the opening frame of his novella, in which a man tells a ghost story that he first heard from a woman.īenson died a couple of years before James got around to writing the story, and Benson's sons couldn’t recall their father ever having shared an anecdote that echoed it. The story, James later wrote in his journal, involved “wicked and depraved” servants who “corrupt and deprave the children” in their charge and come back to haunt them after dying under mysterious circumstances.

While discussing how ghost stories had diminished in both quality and quantity, the esteemed church leader recounted a worthy one that a woman had told him years before. One afternoon in January 1895, Henry James and his cohorts were gathered around the fire at the country house of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benson, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

The godly archbishop who inspired quite a devilish story.

Henry james ghost stories