Fiction · 1888
The Aspern Papers
The Aspern Papers follows an unnamed American editor who talks his way into a room in a decaying Venetian palazzo, under a false name, in order to get near the letters he's sure the elderly Juliana Bordereau is hiding — private papers from her long-dead love affair with the great American poet Jeffrey Aspern. To reach them he must court, or seem to court, her plain middle-aged niece Miss Tita, and the narrator's own scruples come apart faster than the old woman's guard does.
Henry James published the novella in 1888, drawing loosely on a real story he'd heard about a woman who had kept Byron's letters into old age; it's become one of the most-read short treatments in English of the ethics of literary biography — how far a scholar's hunger for a dead writer's private papers is worth what it costs the living people still holding them.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1888 text exactly as Henry James wrote it.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1843–1916 · Victorian
Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York City, the son of a theologian and brother of the philosopher William James, and educated in Europe and America. He settled in England in 1876 and became a British subject in 1915. Among his novels are Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians, What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl; among his tales, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw (1898).
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