The Aspern Papers is a novella by Henry James, first published serially in 1888 in The Atlantic Monthly. It was later released as a book in the same year. The novella explores an unnamed literary biographer's quest to obtain letters written between a deceased American poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and his ex-lover, Juliana Bordereau, who now resides in Venice with her niece, Miss Tita (in a revised American edition of the novella, James changed Miss Tita's name to "Miss Tina"). The novella was highly popular when it was released, and is representative of James's ability to intertwine elements of horror and suspense with complex character studies through narrative voice. Its themes and style have much in common with James's other well-known serial novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898).
The Aspern Papers is based on a real-life event that James learned of while staying in a villa in Florence: letters exchanged between Claire Clairmont, one of Lord Byron's ex-lovers, and Percy Shelley. The mythological figure of Jeffrey Aspern is based on Lord Byron, while Juliana is based loosely on Claire Clairmont, although James never met either of them. According to letters and a preface to the 1908 edition of The Aspern Papers, Claire Clairmont was visited by an American lodger named Captain Silsbee, who, like the narrator of the novella, wanted to obtain the letters that Clairmont, Byron, and Shelley had exchanged many years prior. In fictionalizing the supposed event, James relocated the story to Venice rather than Florence, and explored not only the obsessions that people develop with literary artifacts, but also a theme that is common to much of his fiction: Americans in Europe and the expatriate community.
While he was in Florence and composing The Aspern Papers, James also shared a villa with a friend, the middle-aged Constance Fenimore Woolson. Although Woolson was romantically interested in James, James rejected her advances; some critics hypothesize that the character of Miss Tita, whom the narrator often describes as single or pathetic and routinely mentions her age, was based on Woolson.
