InfluenceHIGH
Added by · 15 September 2026

The influence
The Turn of the Screw
Short Story · 1898

The work it shaped
The Haunting of Hill House
Book · 1959
James built the device Jackson perfected: a haunting told by somebody whose account you cannot trust, so the reader never learns whether the house is haunted or the woman is unwell. The governess and Eleanor Vance occupy the same position, an isolated unmarried woman given charge of something in a large house, and both stories refuse to resolve which reading is true. Jackson admired James and the debt has been traced by critics since Hill House was published.
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