The other James was very prolific as a short story writer, but wrote very few that are under forty pages, and the one I’ve chosen is long enough to qualify as a novella. But it is included in the Everyman edition of his collected short stories, and having read all of them recently, I’m finding that there is something to be said for the long short story. When teaching short stories I usually emphasize the importance of making use of the form’s restricted length, but James is having none of that. Which means that his stories have the quality of compressed novels, but suffer no loss as a result. ‘The Aspern Papers’ is James at his most sensuous, playful and charming. Set in Venice, it concerns a literary scholar’s attempts to get close to the ageing muse of a great poet, using gardening, of all things, as a cover for his endeavours. It is lush, seductive, witty and unsettling.
First published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1888, now available in The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, Penguin Modern Classics, 2014
A Personal Anthology 