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The Aspern Papers

1888

Henry James

The Aspern Papers

Henry James

1888

A literary historian travels to decaying Venice with a single mission: to obtain the intimate letters of the great poet Jeffrey Aspern from his elderly former lover, Juliana Bordereau. Posing as a tenant in her crumbling palazzo, he begins a slow campaign of charm and manipulation, hoping to seduce his way into her confidence. But Juliana is no naive mark - she tests him, toys with him, and keeps him dangling in a suspense that becomes almost unbearable. Her niece Tita, trapped between the old woman's tyranny and her own quietly desperate longings, becomes an unwitting bargaining chip in their silent war of wills. James transforms what begins as a literary treasure hunt into something far darker: a meditation on obsession, the ethics of biography, and the ways we consume the private lives of artists. The narrator's hunger to possess Aspern's secrets reveals his own spiritual poverty more than any document could. Set against the labyrinthine waterways and sultry decay of Venice, this is James at his most unsettling - where every courtesy masks a calculation, and the pursuit of truth becomes indistinguishable from theft.

Project Gutenberg

A novella written in the late 19th century. The story centers around an unnamed narrator who travels to Venice with the...

Wikipedia

The Aspern Papers is a novella by American writer Henry James, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, wit...

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'The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where, at the sigh...

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