One of the opinions held by Henry James of which we can be most certain is that he disliked the promiscuous rummaging among the papers left by celebrated people after their deaths. He expressed this view many times during the course of his life, both in his writings, whether fiction (as here) or non-fiction, and in his actions, notably in his sixties and seventies when he deliberately destroyed large numbers of documents on two occasions when he felt he might be about to die. One of his most discussed tales hinges on this very subject of documents relating to a writer’s private life, The Aspern papers of 1888, and he seems to have been led to consider the topic again by the death of his sister Alice on 1892-03-06. Just two weeks after this event he noted the idea for the story presented here and he quickly moved on to write it and submit it to the Cosmopolitan magazine under the title Jersey Villas. It is unclear to me how quickly James found out about Alice’s diary, with its frank record of gossip and of her opinions, but it is a short step from Jeffrey Aspern’s private legacy to the idea of compromising papers hidden in a bureau.

Strangely, in view of the importance of the idea to James and critical interest in The Aspern papers, there seems to very little comment ever published on Sir Dominick Ferrand (as the book version of the tale was called). Details of what there is and of the two sources of the text can be found in my bibliography. You may be interested in details of any problems I encountered while editing the source text for its presentation here, which can be found on a separate page, otherwise just start reading.