Benjamin Britten did more than any other composer since Henry Purcell to promote the genre of English opera and its use of the English language. There is less consensus on the contribution made by Myfanwy Piper as Britten’s librettist for The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice. Even a limited degree of familiarity with her libretti for Britten induces admiration owing to the precision behind her choice of word and phrase and the way they it can enhance immediacy. She herself has observed that all three libretti that she wrote for Britten were based on sophisticated texts. In his librettist, Britten trusted his closest concerns: someone who could translate the drama in the literary texts into taut succinct scenes; manage abrupt changes of mood; dovetail each scene neatly into the next so that narrative suspense is was sustained; and who could also manage pace, climax, and dramatic development with tact and sensibility. In all this Myfanwy Piper excelled, and she remains unsurpassed in the economy with which she handled words.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).