What is the price of love?
What is the price of knowing?
Venice in the 1880s: the Misses Bordereau have retired to their vast palace in a musty corner of this magic city, where love and life sit cheek by jowl with greed and decay. Into their lives comes an unscrupulous critic, hell-bent on discovering the papers of the late Jeffrey Aspern, a world-famous American poet and, some sixty years before, the lover of Miss Juliana. Miss Juliana is ancient, aloof and imperious. More accessible by far is Miss Tina, middle-aged and frumpish, but also completely unpredictable.
The anonymous critic will pay any price for the Aspern Papers, but Miss Tina, too, sets her price.
The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, text summary, and chronology of James's life and times.
