The Haunting of Bly Manor: where to start reading
Adapts The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at The Turn of the Screw.
The nine-episode first season (October 2020) mostly follows the plot of James's The Turn of the Screw — a governess arriving to care for two orphaned children at an English country house, and the ghosts of the estate's former valet and governess — through roughly its first half. Episode 6 ('The Jolly Corner') and episode 8 ('The Romance of Certain Old Clothes') fold in two more James ghost stories almost wholesale, and from around episode 6 onward the season increasingly departs from the novella's own plot, building to an original, far more emotionally resolved ending than James's deliberately ambiguous close. Because the season is only loosely tethered to one text, finishing it does not track your place in the novella the way a close adaptation would; treat the book as its own short, separate read.
Limited Series draws on this book. Read the full story:
The Turn of the Screw
Mike Flanagan's Netflix limited series mostly adapts Henry James's 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, but braids in several of James's other ghost stories to fill nine episodes — Flanagan has said a straight adaptation would run about two episodes of story and eight of filler. The two most direct outside borrowings are 'The Jolly Corner' (episode 6) and 'The Romance of Certain Old Clothes' (episode 8); every episode's title is drawn from a different James work. Roughly from episode 6 on, the season moves past the novella's own plot and invents its own, far more emotionally resolved ending in place of James's famously ambiguous, unresolved close. The novella is a short, and very differently unsettling, read.
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