Recommendations
Books Like The Aspern Papers
Best books to read after The Aspern Papers by Henry James
Henry James's most perfectly concentrated novella (1888) — an American editor's obsessive and deceitful pursuit of the love letters of the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern from the aged Juliana Bordereau in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, culminating in the ironic twist that destroys his moral credit and his prize simultaneously. These recommendations extend the experience through James's other major works, through the tradition of the Venice literary narrative, and through fiction that engages the ethics of the artistic pursuit.
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
James's Gothic novella — the most famous companion to The Aspern Papers in the James novella form; where The Aspern Papers is a comedy of obsession with an ironic unreliable narrator, The Turn of the Screw is a horror story with an ambiguous unreliable narrator; reading both together shows James's range in the short-form fiction he excelled at.
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Washington Square
by Henry James
James's most accessible novel and the best introduction to his longer fiction — the story of Catherine Sloper's courtship by the fortune-hunter Morris Townsend and her father Dr. Sloper's cold interference covers similar ground to The Aspern Papers (the ruthlessness of intelligent people's pursuit of their objectives) in a more contained domestic setting.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's first great novel and his fullest treatment of the American-in-Europe theme — where The Aspern Papers concentrates the American's obsessive European pursuit into a novella, The Portrait of a Lady gives the theme full novelistic range through Isabel Archer's story; the most important companion to The Aspern Papers in James's early work.
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Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Mann's novella (1912) approaches the same Venetian obsession from a German perspective and with more tragic seriousness — Aschenbach's obsession with the boy Tadzio in Venice parallels the narrator's obsession with the Aspern papers; both novellas use Venice as a city of decadent pursuit where the obsessive loses whatever moral credit they began with.
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's novel shares The Aspern Papers' interest in the aesthete's relationship to beauty he cannot possess — Charles Ryder's pursuit of the Brideshead world through Sebastian and then Julia parallels the narrator's pursuit of Aspern's letters through Juliana and then Tita; both narrators are aesthetes whose pursuit of beauty damages the human beings who embody it.
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
James's late novel is The Aspern Papers expanded to full novelistic scale — Kate Croy and Merton Densher's exploitation of the dying Milly Theale repeats the narrator's exploitation of Juliana and Tita, but with greater psychological complexity and more devastating moral consequences; the novella's ironic ending becomes the novel's tragic one.
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's novel features the most elaborate literary obsession in twentieth-century fiction — Kinbote's commentary on Shade's poem is the most extreme form of the literary-pursuit-that-destroys-its-object that The Aspern Papers explores; reading both together illuminates what the pursuit of a dead man's literary legacy does to the living people caught in its wake.
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The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
Barnes's Booker Prize-winning novella inherits The Aspern Papers' structure — an unreliable narrator's pursuit of documents from his past that he believes will illuminate a long-ago event, only to discover that his own memories are the documents most in need of revision; the most direct contemporary descendant of James's formula.
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