I finished The Turn Of The Screw the other day after doing my usual thing of mislaying the book I'm reading for several weeks. Anyway, it's... good. As I said before, a really effective and creepy story where the tension is ratcheted up with expert slowness - the title makes more sense the more you read it. But one thing I found a slight letdown was that the story carries with it the reputation of being a masterful work of psychological, as opposed to 'merely' supernatural, horror. Basically I had the idea as I started it that [SPOILERS] it was meant to be highly ambiguous as to whether the ghosts had any objective reality or were just the figment of the narrator's imagination. This is thwarted by the fact that she's seen both ghosts before she learns that her predecessor Miss Jessel is dead, and before learning that any such person as Peter Quint ever existed. Her description of the appearance of both figures is then corroborated in every detailed by the housekeeper, who is apparently doesn't have a trace of imagination or mischief in her and has no reason to mislead the narrator. There's no reason she'd have seen a picture of either of the dead people, so the only possible conclusion is that she really has seen their ghosts. It has the same effect on any ambiguity that might have been intended as the tiny origami unicorn left by Gaff in Deckard's apartment in some editions of Blade Runner has on the question of whether Deckard is a Replicant.
Reading up on critical opinions of the story, it's apparently suggested that contemporary readers would have understood the implication that Quint and Jessel were molesting the two children, which certainly adds another level of horror to the story (which in a sense is necessary, because it's hard to imagine what, even to Victorian readers, was otherwise quite so horrific about the two people in life - and so dangerous to the children - beyond the simple fact that they were having an affair and may have persuaded the children not to expose them). The only other horror story I can think of that features a theme of child abuse is Ligotti's 'Conversations in a Dead Language'. I suppose child molestors are the bogeymen of our time and for most authors the idea is horrific enough in itself to make any additional supernatural horror redundant.
More comically, it's apparently been suggested that the narrator spontaneously invents the ghosts because of the strain of 'sexual repression'. Now I'm no psychiatrist but I'm going out on a limb here and saying I don't think anyone who wasn't already mad ever hallucinated ghosts for want of a shag.
Regarding the stupid sentences, I've since read most of the rest of this volume of HJ stories and while none of them are exactly shining examples of good writing, TTotS stands out as being particularly bad.