Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw

Description

The new paperback series- Penguin English Library "I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?" Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed. In Daisy Miller James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces. "... a figure of quite as unmistakable horror and evil- a woman in black, pale and dreadful - with such an air also, and such a face! - on the other side of the lake" Oscar Wilde called James's chilling The Turn of the Screw 'a most wonderful, lurid poisonous little tale'. It tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the houses, she soon becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care.

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City. The son of a prominent theologian and philosopher, the young James's intellectual upbringing enabled him to travel widely, studying in New York, London, Paris, Bologna and Geneva. He briefly attended Harvard Law School in 1862 before choosing to dedicate himself instead to writing and literary criticism, with his first short story, A Tragedy of Error, published at the age of twenty-one. Well acquainted with Europe, he moved more permanently to England, living in London and later Sussex. A prominent literary figure and noted socialite, he admitted to having accepted 107 invitations in the winter of 1878-9 alone. James became a British citizen in 1915, received the Order of Merit in 1916, and died that year at the age of seventy-two. Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove are also published in the Penguin English Library.