Henry James

The Penguin English Library Edition of Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James"I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?" This edition contains two of Henry James's most popular short works. 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? In Daisy Miller Henry James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces. 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. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Blackport-on-Dwindle - 'all granite, fog and female fiction' - has been the Gedges' dull hometown for some years. They leap, therefore, at the invitation to become the live-in guardians of the birthplace of the nation's literary hero. Anticipating romance and inspiration - all that has been lacking in their lives to date - they find, instead, that the house casts an altogether more sinister spell. In The Birthplace, James displays his eye for character and a wry appreciation of pretension and the absurd. As is famously recorded, James doubted Shakespeare's authorship of the plays ascribed to him and The Birthplace illustrates his cynical attitude towards the cult of the Bard and the visitor industry that it had engendered. The Birthplace is published here alongside The Private Life, another little-known work in which James again considers the relevance of the artist's persona - a theme with continued relevance in literature and the arts.