Henry James' "The Aspern Papers" with Robert Harrison, Tobias Wolff, Elena Danielson & Cynthia Haven

Stanford's "Another Look" zoom discussion of Henry James's The Aspern Papers took place on Monday, August 24, 2020. Discussants included author and Another Look director Robert Pogue Harrison, National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, Elena Danielson, director emerita of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, and author Cynthia Haven.
The Aspern Papers was inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley's correspondence with Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein. (Shelley's novel was featured in our January 2017 event.) Clairmont cherished the letters until her death.
In James's The Aspern Papers, an elderly invalid who once was the beloved of a renowned American poet Jeffrey Aspern lives in seclusion with her spinster niece in a Venetian palazzo. The unnamed narrator goes through elaborate machinations to gain access to her private papers and literary relics from the long-ago romance.
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Another Look is a seasonal book club that draws together Stanford's top writers and scholars with distinguished figures from the Bay Area and beyond. The books are Stanford’s picks for short masterpieces you may not have read because they have been forgotten, overlooked, or simply have not received the attention they merit.
This event was sponsored by:
Stanford Continuing Studies Program
Stanford Distinguished Career Institute
With special thanks for technical support to:
Roger Winkelman and the Freeman Spogli Institute