The interview brings plenty of warning signs (the last few nannies have abruptly quit one of the children sobs “it’s not safe here…”) but Rowan takes the job, anyway. This high-tech update on Henry James finds a nanny named Rowan taking a job in a mansion full of surveillance devices and smart-home technology. The title gives a not-so-subtle nod to Ware’s inspiration. Its fans include everyone from Stephen King to Gillian Flynn, and 2020 brought a nine-episode adaptation on Netflix: The Haunting of Bly Manor. For decades, this Henry James novella was a staple of high school curriculums (if you have to persuade teenagers to read 19th century literature, I guess it helps to have a ghost). We begin with the Grand Dame of every ghostly nanny novel-a book that established all the ground rules much like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice created the template for contemporary romcoms. Novelists and Hollywood screenwriters have been riffing on the story for nearly 125 years! Here are six of my favorite books featuring inquisitive nannies, creepy children, supernatural forces, curiously distant parents, disapproving housekeepers, and so much more. These are the broad strokes of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and my novel Hidden Pictures plays with the formula by moving the action to an affluent New Jersey suburb and adding tons of creepy black-and-white drawings (the child in my story is an artist prone to violent illustrations).īut I’m hardly the first writer to be inspired by The Turn of the Screw’s plot and mood.
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