The Aspern Papers

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and lived most of his adult life in England, becoming a naturalized English citizen in 1915, a year before his death in 1916. His father, Henry, was a lecturer and his brother, William, a philosopher. James’s family spent time in European cities including London, Paris, and Geneva during his youth, and he enrolled in Harvard Law School at the age of 19, but focused primarily on reading literature and writing. As an adult, James never married and spent most of his adult life outside the US, living in Rome, Paris, and England. Many of his works address the cultural contrasts between the US and Europe. Several of his most notable works are The American (1877), about a self-made millionaire; The Portrait of A Lady (1881), in which a young woman from New York receives a family inheritance that prompts travel to England and Italy and makes her subject to various schemes devised by other characters; and The Turn of the Screw (1898), an eerie story in which a governess attempts to protect two children in her care from ghosts of former household servants. An important figure in the