The Turn of the Screw
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free The Turn of the Screw trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is a short book that readers have argued about for more than a century. A young governess takes charge of an orphaned brother and sister at a lonely English country house and becomes convinced that the dead are reaching for them. Whether she is right is a question the story refuses to settle, and that refusal keeps it alive in classrooms, book clubs and horror fiction. This quiz covers the whole novella: the fireside prologue, who each character is and what becomes of them, the sightings and confrontations, and the small details that critics have built whole theories on. It also looks at how James came to write the tale and at its long afterlife on stage, on screen and in other writers' work. It suits students revising the text, teachers who want a ready-made multiple-choice quiz, book groups, and anyone who has watched a screen version and wants to see how it compares with the original. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print it for a class.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future Sex and the City star played the little girl in a 1976 Broadway version of The Turn of the Screw?
Sarah Jessica Parker
Sarah Jessica Parker played the haunted girl opposite Claire Bloom's governess in a revival directed by Harold Pinter, which closed after only 12 performances.
Q 02Which Hollywood legend played the sinister servant in The Nightcomers, a 1971 prequel to The Turn of the Screw?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando played him as a groundskeeper with an Irish accent, and the film ends as a new governess arrives, the point where Henry James's story begins.
Q 03Which bestselling author named The Turn of the Screw one of only two great supernatural horror tales in a century?
Stephen King
Stephen King made the claim in Danse Macabre, his survey of the genre, and gave the other place to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Q 04Which Stranger Things actor played the troubled schoolboy in The Turning, a 2020 film of The Turn of the Screw?
Finn Wolfhard
Finn Wolfhard played the boy in a version that moves the story to 1994 and was filmed at Killruddery House in Ireland.
Q 05Which 1847 novel about a governess does The Turn of the Screw echo when its heroine imagines a mad relative locked away?
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's novel, keeps Mr Rochester's wife hidden in the attic; James's governess wonders whether her own new home holds a secret of the same kind.
Q 06What happens to the young boy in the governess's arms in the final sentence of The Turn of the Screw?
His heart stops
His heart stops just as she believes she has freed him from the ghost, and Henry James ends there, never returning to the fireside listeners of the opening.
Q 07What is the name of the remote country house where the governess takes up her post in The Turn of the Screw?
Bly
Bly is an old family estate whose owner, the children's uncle, lives mainly in London; the name returned in 2020 in the title of a Netflix series based on the story.
Q 08What main condition does the children's uncle set before hiring the governess in The Turn of the Screw?
Never to trouble him
Never to trouble him was the rule: she must not appeal, complain or write, a demand that had already frightened off several other applicants.
Q 09What did critic Edmund Wilson argue in 1934 that the governess's ghosts in The Turn of the Screw were?
Her own hallucinations
Her own hallucinations, Wilson argued, sprang from sexual repression, and his Freudian reading fuelled a long debate over whether the ghosts are real at all.
Q 10Which British singer based the 1980 song The Infant Kiss on a film version of The Turn of the Screw?
Kate Bush
Kate Bush sings as a governess frightened by her feelings for a boy possessed by a grown man's spirit; the song appears on her chart-topping album Never for Ever.
Q 11Which boy in The Turn of the Screw comes home for the summer after his school refuses to have him back?
Miles
Miles is about ten, and his headmaster's letter gives no reason for the expulsion, which leaves the governess to imagine the worst about so charming a pupil.
Q 12What is the name of the younger orphan, a little girl, whom the governess teaches in The Turn of the Screw?
Flora
Flora seems angelic at first, but after a confrontation by the lake she turns on the governess and asks never to see her again.
Q 13Which housekeeper is the governess's only confidante in The Turn of the Screw, though she never sees a ghost herself?
Mrs. Grose
Mrs. Grose once served as maid to the uncle's mother, and it is she who puts names to the figures the governess describes.
Q 21In which American city was Henry James, author of The Turn of the Screw, born before he settled for good in England?
New York
New York was his birthplace, at Washington Place in Manhattan, but he spent most of his adult life in Europe and took British citizenship a year before he died.
Q 22Which guest in the prologue of The Turn of the Screw reads the governess's manuscript aloud to the fireside party?
Douglas
Douglas knew the governess when she taught his sister, and he has kept her manuscript in a locked drawer for years since her death.
Q 23In which English county does Henry James place the haunted country house of The Turn of the Screw?
Essex
Essex is where the uncle keeps his old family place, though he lives in London and leaves the estate to its servants.
Q 14Which dead servant in The Turn of the Screw does the housekeeper name after the governess describes a hatless stranger?
Peter Quint
Peter Quint is recognised from the governess's description before she knows he ever existed, the point that defenders of real ghosts lean on hardest.
Q 15Which former governess in The Turn of the Screw, now dead, seems to appear to the little girl beside the lake?
Miss Jessel
Miss Jessel had been close to another servant despite the gap in their rank, and she went away and died in circumstances the housekeeper never fully explains.
Q 16What job had the male ghost in The Turn of the Screw held in the uncle's household while he was alive?
Valet
Valet to the children's uncle, he was left in charge of the country house when his master went back to London, and was far too free with everyone there.
Q 17On which night do the house guests of The Turn of the Screw sit round a fire trading ghost stories?
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve suits a gruesome tale, the narrator says, and one guest promises a story so dreadful that nobody but him has ever heard it.
Q 18Which film star, then forty, played the twenty-year-old governess in the 1961 film of The Turn of the Screw?
Deborah Kerr
Deborah Kerr is on screen for about 95 of the film's 99 minutes; her director told her to play the part as she felt it but never to forget the ambiguity.
Q 19Which English composer turned The Turn of the Screw into a 1954 chamber opera built on a twelve-note theme?
Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten wrote the opera in four months to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, and each of its sixteen scenes opens with a variation on that theme.
Q 20Which American author reworked the screenplay of the 1961 film of The Turn of the Screw, adding its Freudian undertones?
Truman Capote
Truman Capote broke off from writing In Cold Blood for three weeks to do it, and one critic credits him with about 90 per cent of the script as filmed.
Q 24In which country did the two children's parents die before The Turn of the Screw begins, leaving them to an uncle?
India
India is where their father, the uncle's younger military brother, and their mother died; later critics made the detail a starting point for postcolonial readings.
Q 25Where is the male ghost standing when the governess of The Turn of the Screw first sees him at dusk?
On a tower
On a tower of the old house, just as she had been daydreaming of meeting someone on her evening stroll; he stares hard at her as he crosses the battlements, then turns away.
Q 26What does the boy finally admit got him thrown out of school near the end of The Turn of the Screw?
Things he said
Things he said, he tells the governess, to a few boys he liked, who repeated them to others until word reached the masters.
Q 27What does the boy confess he did with the governess's stolen letter to his uncle in The Turn of the Screw?
Burned it
Burned it, he says, after opening it to see what she had written about him and finding nothing inside.
Q 28Which instrument does the boy play to distract the governess while his sister slips away in The Turn of the Screw?
Piano
Piano playing fills the afternoon so completely that the governess loses track of time, and when she starts up his sister has vanished towards the lake.
Q 29With whom is the governess of The Turn of the Screw said to have fallen in love after only two meetings?
Her employer
Her employer, the children's handsome bachelor uncle, saw her only twice; the prologue suggests his charm is why she accepted so daunting a post.
Q 30Who told Henry James the ghostly anecdote, over tea in 1895, that grew into The Turn of the Screw?
The Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, told him a tale of dead servants corrupting children, which James wrote in his notebook two days later.