short-story collection The Aleph, Borges wrote that the inspiration for "The House of Asterion" and the "character of its sad protagonist" was The Minotaur, a painting completed in 1885 by English artist George Frederic Watts. The painting depicts the mythological Minotaur as a solitary and seemingly lonely creature, leaning on a parapet and staring longingly at the sea while gripping a crushed bird in his hand. Borges's composition of "The House of Asterion" and other short stories in The Aleph coincided with his turbulent relationship with Argentine writer Estela Canto. Borges first met Canto in 1944 and proposed to her only a year later; but their relationship ended in July 1946 after Canto came to resent Borges's mother, whom she found to be overly controlling of him. Edwin Williamson, one of Borges's biographers, wrote that Canto's desertion of Borges and his subsequent unhappiness influenced elements of "The House of Asterion", including the title character's extreme loneliness and desire to be liberated from his monotonous existence. According to Norman Thomas di Giovanni, an editor and translator who frequently collaborated with Borges, "The House of Asterion" was written over a period of two days in 1947, after Borges discovered that he had two blank pages to fill in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, the literary magazine he edited. Modern analyses of Borges's original handwritten manuscript, which is kept at the University of Virginia, have revealed the revisions he made to earlier drafts of the work in order to more effectively disguise the narrator's identity in the story's beginning. For instance, Borges replaced the phrase "" (the Greeks) with "" (the men) in the third sentence, removing a potential intimation of Greek mythology. Analyses of Borges's revisions have also suggested that, while writing the story, he experimented with various framings of the reveal of Asterion's identity, deliberating on whether to explicitly name the Minotaur's labyrinth and to mention the nature of Theseus's weapon. The original Spanish-language version of "The House of Asterion" was published in print in the May–June 1947 edition of Los Anales de Buenos Aires. It was accompanied by an illustration, by Austrian artist Marie Elisabeth Wrede, depicting Asterion slumped on the ground with his head covered by a shroud, as Theseus stands over him, sword in hand. The story would later be included, alongside twelve other short stories by Borges, in The Aleph, first published by Editorial Losada in June