Literature feeds off other literature and why ever not? Think of Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, bred from, respectively, Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway. Think of Shakespeare for that matter, who told a good story provided someone else had told it to him first.
To get the most out of this chilling little tale you really do need to have read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. If you have not, shame on you, but Penguin Popular Classics have it for all of £1.50 and you have the treat in store of the greatest ghost story ever written. Come back here when you’ve done.
Right. Good, isn’t it ? Now read on.
Sallie Declan is a young American PhD student living in a London, which is not at all as she pictured it, after filling her head with the Bloomsbury of Virginia Woolf. In Ohio she had the Group, after the novel by Mary MacCarthy (literature breeding literature again), who were close, intimate, sworn sisters. ‘She missed the sense of belonging not merely to a set but to the clever set.’ In London Sallie lives in an impersonal Hall of Residence and has no friends, though her tutor occasionally invites her to vegetarian family Sunday lunch in Wimbledon, ‘the glacial equivalent of home life’.
None of it really matters, though, because Sallie is obsessed by the subject of her thesis, a post-modern interpretation of The Turn of the Screw. She eats, sleeps and dreams it. It becomes her friend, her refuge, her comfort blanket, but when she slips from gloom into serious depression she thinks of getting away completely for a break from work and London. So she answers an advertisement.
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