The Aspern Papers

An American editor obsessed with the dead Romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern learns that Aspern's former lover, Juliana Bordereau, now very old, lives in seclusion in a decaying palace in Venice with her shy, middle-aged niece, and that she still keeps the poet's letters. Under a false name he rents rooms in their house, fills the garden with flowers and courts the niece's friendship, ready to do almost anything to get hold of the papers.

Henry James based this novella, published in 1888, on a story he heard in Florence about a man who tried to obtain Shelley's letters from Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's stepsister and Lord Byron's former lover, who lived into old age. It is a subtle study of the ethics of biography and of its narrator's self-deceptions. It pairs well with The Turn of the Screw; for the author himself, see his life.

Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York, the brother of the philosopher William James, and was educated in Europe and America. In 1876 he settled in London, and later in the small town of Rye, and spent his life writing about Americans in Europe and the clash of innocence and experience.

In some twenty novels and more than a hundred stories, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw, he developed a subtle, psychological style that influenced modern fiction. He became a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death.