The Turn of the Screw

The governess Gothic tradition — a plain, intelligent woman alone in a remote estate with secrets. Bronte resolves what James refuses to.

Direct descendant of James's technique — the question of whether the house is haunted or the protagonist is psychologically disintegrating. Jackson learned ambiguity from James.

Another woman confined, another question of madness versus reality, another text where female perception is simultaneously powerful and suspect

Frame narratives, ghosts, an isolated estate, the question of whether love transcends death or whether the living project the dead onto the landscape

Published the same year — another frame narrative, another unreliable narrator, another descent into ambiguity where the 'horror' is never fully specified

The unreliable narrator who insists on their own sanity — Poe's technique made explicit where James leaves it implicit