The Aspern Papers

One night, decades after I first read James’s suspenseful gem of a novel, the book suddenly came to mind.

For years, I’d been struggling with how to fit together two women whose voices had been haunting my head. Now, in a flash, I saw the parallels they offered to the characters in Aspern. A determined, none-too-scrupulous scholar (male, in James’s book), an elderly woman who’d had a secret affair with a celebrated man, the two living together in the ruins of a once-elegant home, and a cache of hoarded papers the scholar desperately wants…

I dissected Aspern chapter by… show more.