The Aspern Papers

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and lived most of his adult life in England, becoming a naturalized English citizen in 1915, a year before his death in 1916. His father, Henry, was a lecturer and his brother, William, a philosopher. James’s family spent time in European cities including London, Paris, and Geneva during his youth, and he enrolled in Harvard Law School at the age of 19, but focused primarily on reading literature and writing. As an adult, James never married and spent most of his adult life outside the US, living in Rome, Paris, and England. Many of his works address the cultural contrasts between the US and Europe. Several of his most notable works are The American (1877), about a self-made millionaire; The Portrait of A Lady (1881), in which a young woman from New York receives a family inheritance that prompts travel to England and Italy and makes her subject to various schemes devised by other characters; and The Turn of the Screw (1898), an eerie story in which a governess attempts to protect two children in her care from ghosts of former household servants. An important figure in the genre of American realism, James is also associated with the genre of travel writing given his own cosmopolitan experience and the subject of many of his writings. Particularly in his later works, he began to move toward modernist techniques.

James’s inspiration for The Aspern Papers was having heard a similar story about an art critic who attempted to obtain letters from the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron from two women in Florence who possessed the letters. In a notebook from January 12, 1887, James wrote that this event “strikes me much. The interest would be in some price that the man has to pay – that the old woman – or the survivor – sets upon the papers. His hesitations – his struggle – for he really would give almost anything” (Appendix to The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, ed. by Michael Gorra. London: Penguin, 2014, p. 318). Both Shelley and Byron are canonical English Romantic poets who have been the subject of extensive literary criticism that has involved attention to details of personal life and experience.

Given the time period and characteristics of James’s writing, he is regarded as an important figure of transition between literary realism and modernism, the latter period characterized by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Aspern Papers includes several narrative techniques that suggest the shift from realism to modernism, particularly related to narrative style. The use of first-person narration in the novella includes extensive focus on the narrator’s thoughts within the prose. While this is not a modernist technique, as the narrative is in first and not third person, it gestures toward the free indirect discourse (in which characters’ thoughts are interspersed into third-person prose) that characterizes subsequent modernist writings. Similarly, the use of parenthesis in the narrative enables James to represent the narrator’s thought process in detail; this technique was further developed in the stream-of-consciousness technique of modernist writers.