This book has been a harrowing journey for me. Full disclosure: I didn't finish the last 30 pages. I've been reading this book for weeks, and it started out so wonderfully and then trudged to a slow and agonizing end. I bought this book of short stories, because I love Daisy Miller, and I needed to own it. Upon second reading, I still love Daisy Miller. A pattern develops upon reading it in conjunction with the other stories. A man, who is far too introspective and certain in the truth of his worldview, finds a female companion who baffles him because of his limited perspective and inability to practice empathy. The moral of each either being that women are a mystery, or that men's limited understanding of women and inability to see them as equally as human as they are prevents them from realizing important life-saving truths. This pattern is clear in each story aside from The Turn of the Screw. So, I found these women to be fascinating, and I can't decide whether I loved or hated digging out the reality of them by analyzing that which mystified the narrators. Weirdly enough, the eponymous story of this collection is where it all fell apart for me. While James's many clauses and long sentences add beautiful description and detail to the earlier stories, they turned The Turn of the Screw into a slow wordy agony. The mystery and suspense of this ghost story were lost in the redundancy of the language. While the story is a fascinating example of ambiguity, the delivery is slow and allows the plot to be easily predicted. The last story, The Beast in the Jungle, seems to suffer from the same problem. ( )

An excellent ghost/psychological disintegration story. ( )

Read during Fall 2001

It should have been more unnerving. I have been reading alot of Henry James recently and I find his long passages of phsycological explanation interesting but here, it pulled me away from the terror of the other passages. Perhaps I should have read this all in one sitting. It didn't benefit from my breaking it up as well as James doing the same.

Reread in 2019

Still don't get. I think this is actually the third time and the main thrust still evades me. This time I read it for bookclub so maybe someone else will get more from it and tell me what I keep missing.

An International Episode and Daisy Miller: A Study were my two favorites. The Turning of a Screw confused me and I did a Wikipedia search after reading it to make sure I understood the story correctly. (I did.) I enjoyed the literary analysis that has been done on that story, which I read about on Wikipedia -- were there really ghosts or was the governess insane!

I'm glad I read these. I greatly enjoyed reading some classic tales, especially since I haven't read any Classics since college (a year and a half ago), but I won't be keeping this book. I didn't enjoy Henry James' writing enough to reread these, unfortunately.

Adrianne ( )

An International Episode (1878): ** A chore to read. It's well written, just full of silly people doing uninteresting things.
Daisy Miller (1878):
The Aspern Papers(1888):
The Altar of the Dead (1895):
The Turn of the Screw (1898): *** By far the most famous of the stories collected here. There's a lot to digest, but I think we're dealing here with an unreliable narrator. Frankly, the woman is nuts. Not what I expected.
The Beast in the Jungle (1903): ( )