English · Advanced
Read The Turn of the Screw in Englishwith every sentence explained
Henry James · 1898
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under horror. It runs to about 39,400 words.
Two perfect children. A lonely country house. Faces that should not be there.
A young governess takes a post at Bly, a remote estate in the English countryside, caring for two orphaned children. Their uncle, a handsome gentleman in London, sets her one strange condition: she must never trouble him about anything.
At first, Bly seems like paradise. Little Flora is an angel, and her brother Miles is charming — even though he has been sent home from school for reasons no one will explain. Then the governess begins to see figures: a man staring down from a tower, a pale woman in black across the lake. The kindly housekeeper, Mrs Grose, recognises the descriptions. And the governess becomes convinced the children are in terrible danger.
Henry James's chilling 1898 novella is one of the most famous ghost stories ever written.
- Author
- Henry James
- First published
- 1898
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Horror
- Length
- About 39,400 words
How it opens
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.
Reading The Turn of the Screw in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
