strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment when the scales of the balance hang with the right evenness. (x)

This passage seems to promise that ‘The Aspern Papers’ will be a narrative about a successful visiting of the early nineteenth century, the time when Byron and Shelley lived in Italy. That James’s definition of such a past (familiar and yet strange) corresponds exactly to Freud’s definition of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) might give the reader pause. It would define such a recovery of the past as a raising of ghosts, the return of something repressed, something exposed and yet hidden, something known that nevertheless ought to be kept secret. This definition of the near past as an uncanny mixture of familiarity and strangeness may connect this story in some obscure way with James’s ghost stories, such as ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘The Turn of the Screw’. That, however, may be a false association, since what James here emphasizes is the possible successful recovery of history through narration. There seems nothing uncanny about this success.