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James, "The Aspern Papers," and the Ethics of Literary Biography

Although it has inspired a voluminous body of published scholarship, "The Aspern Papers" is a more intensely personal and topical story than hitherto recognized. To be sure, its central source is well-known: Henry James wrote the nouvelle shortly after learning in January 1887 that a Boston art critic and retired sea captain named Silsbee had schemed to pilfer the papers of Claire Clairmont, Byron's former mistress, who had settled in Italy with her niece. In the story, serialized in 1888 and revised for the New York Edition in 1908, an unnamed narrator also plots to filch papers from Jeffrey Aspern's quondam mistress Juliana Bordereau and her dowdy niece (or daughter) Tina. Most criticism of the tale focuses on one or two formal issuesÂ—the reliability of the narrator and the culpability or rapacity of the Bordereaus. I do not presume that such earlier approaches to the work are wrong. However, they neglect both James's own experience as a "publishing scoundrel" and the circumstances of a recent publishing scandal. "The Aspern Papers" offers, I believe, pointed commentary on the ethics of literary biography inspired in no small part by James's own research into the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne for his monograph in the English Men of Letters series in 1879 and by the controversy surrounding the publication oÃNathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife by Hawthorne's son Julian five years later. James clearly conceived Aspern as a type of the elder HawthorneÂ—not, as usually assumed, as a version of Byron or Shelley.1 Like Hawthorne, Aspern (the