The Lost Moment (1947)

Juliana Borderau: I never sleep. I hear every sound in this house.

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Lewis Venable: Had Jeffrey Ashton once lived in this cold, forbidding house? I felt the past close in around me like a fog. The door to the present shut behind me.

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Lewis Venable: In that fearfully incredible moment I knew I had plunged off a precipice into the past. That here was Juliana beyond belief, beautiful, alluring, alive. How strange this was, this Tina, who walked dead among the living and living among the dead, filling me with a nameless fear! I had a sudden impulse to turn and leave, and then I remembered the letters.

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Henry James based the story on an anecdote he had heard when he was in Florence in 1879. Jane Clairmont, the half-sister of Shelley's wife Mary and the mother of Byron's daughter Electra, was still alive and that an unscrupulous Shelley devotee had posed as a lodger in order find any unpublished papers. After the aged Jane died, her niece offered the papers to him, but at a price.
In 1962 Michael Redgrave successfully adapted the story to the New York stage starring Maurice Evans and Wendy Hiller.
James first published 'The Aspern Papers' in the March-May editions of 'The Atlantic Monthly'. In the original story the heroine's name was Tita. In later editions of the story James changed the name to Tina.
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