The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curran’s Portrait of Percy Shelley

Abstract

Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888; rev. 1908) has most typically been read as a critical examination of the literary scholar’s obsession with the mystery of creativity.¹ There are, of course, obvious and numerous autobiographical resonances to James’s own life in the tale (e.g., James’s interest in the figures of Pushkin, Walt Whitman, Julian Hawthorne, Constance Fenimore Woolson, etc.),² but this essay focuses instead on the presence of what I would call the strange afterlives of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont in the story. Presented as a famous American poet from New York and once the beloved of the now elderly daughter of a prominent American portrait painter, the portrait of the ghostly Jeffrey Aspern—not his papers—is, I would claim, the central and haunting object of desire in the story. One of the most memorable images remaining in one’s mind after reading the story is that beautiful disembodied male head, called a “relic” by the narrator, that has floated from its original and very private storage place in Juliana’s pocket (93) into the pocket of the narrator after Juliana’s death (131) and finally to its ultimate relocation in a public place of honor above the narrator’s writing desk (143). I would claim that James intended this portrait to be modeled very specifically on Amelia Curran’s famous painting of Percy Shelley (see figure 7.1), completed in Rome in 1819, a portrait that was so well known that it had assumed iconic and almost religious status by the time James was writing his novella.³