The Aspern Papers Reading Order

The Aspern Papers (1888) by Henry James is the novella that best distills James's essential subject — the collision between the aesthete's pursuit of art and the human costs of that pursuit — in a story about an American editor who travels to Venice to obtain the love letters of the (fictional) great American Romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern from the aged Juliana Bordereau, Aspern's former lover, who lives in a crumbling palazzo with her spinster niece Tita. The narrator's willingness to deceive, exploit, and eventually destroy these two women in pursuit of the papers is presented without any of the moral condemnation James's own position would seem to require — the unreliable narrator of The Aspern Papers is as self-serving as Barry Lyndon but far more genteel about it — and the climax, in which Tita offers herself as a condition of receiving the papers and the narrator recoils, is one of the finest ironical endings in short fiction.