A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale -- Oscar Wilde

It really does turn your blood cold -- Colm Tóibín

Technically, he is extraordinarily brilliant, and stylistically he's wonderful -- David Lodge

Henry James is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry -- Graham Greene

[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation -- T. S. Eliot

The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern - Independent

We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves... Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark -- Virginia Woolf

Henry James was born on 15th April 1843 in Washington Place, New York to a wealthy and intellectual family and as a youth travelled between Europe and America. His first novel, Watch and Ward, was published in 1871 after first appearing serially in Atlantic Monthly. After a brief period in Paris, James moved first to London and then later to Rye in Sussex. He became a British citizen in 1915 to declare his loyalty to his adopted country as well as to protest against America's refusal to enter the war on behalf of Britain. Henry James was a prolific writer and critic and from around 1875 until his death he maintained a strenuous schedule of publications in a variety of genres: novels, short story collections, literary criticism, travel writing, biography and autobiography. He died in 1916.