Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Titles in Fiction category:

• Carmilla    

  Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates.

• Green Tea

  Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scra ...

• Haunted Baronet, The

  The pretty little town of Golden Friars--standing by the margin of the lake, hemmed round by an amphitheatre of purple mountain, rich in tint and furrowed by ravines, high in air, when the tall gables and narrow windows of its ancient graystone houses, and the tower of the old church, fro ...

• Madam Crowl's Ghost

  Twenty years have passed since you last saw Mrs. Jolliffe's tall slim figure. She is now past seventy, and can't have many mile-stones more to count on the journey that will bring her to her long home. The hair has grown white as snow, that is parted under her cap, over her shrewd, but ki ...

• Mr. Justice Harbottle

  On this case Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the words, "Harman's Report," and a simple reference to his own extraordinary Essay on "The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof."

• Mysterious Lodger, The

  About the year 1822 I resided in a comfortable and roomy old house, the exact locality of which I need not particularise, further than to say that it was not very far from Old Brompton, in the immediate neighbourhood, or rather continuity (as even my Connemara readers perfectly well know) ...

• Room in the Dragon Volant, The

  The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary Essay upon the Drug of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius.

• Ultor De Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen

  In my youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate, though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the aids of a ...

• Wylder's Hand

  It was late in the autumn, and I was skimming along, through a rich English county, in a postchaise, among tall hedgerows gilded, like all the landscape, with the slanting beams of sunset. The road makes a long and easy descent into the little town of Gylingden, and down this we were goin ...

Titles in Short Stories category:

• Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street, An    

  It is not worth telling, this story of mine--at least, not worth writing. Told, indeed, as I have sometimes been called upon to tell it, to a circle of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good after-dinner fire on a winter's evening, with a cold wind rising and wailing outside, a ...

• Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House, An

  [The Editor of the University Magazine submits the following very remarkable statement, with every detail of which he has been for some years acquainted, upon the ground that it affords the most authentic and ample relation of a series of marvellous phenoma, in nowise connected wit ...

• Child that Went with the Fairies, The

  Eastward of the old city of Limerick, about ten Irish miles under the range of mountains known as the Slieveelim hills, famous as having afforded Sarsfield a shelter among their rocks and hollows, when he crossed them in his gallant descent upon the cannon and ammunition of King William, ...

• Dead Sexton, The

  Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coach-house in the inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before this story begins, under strange circumstances, and in a place where it might have lain the better part of a week undisturbed; and a dreadful suspicion asto ...

• Dickon the Devil

  About thirty years ago I was selected by two rich old maids to visit a property in that part of Lancashire which lies near the famous forest of Pendle, with which Mr. Ainsworth's "Lancashire Witches" has made us so pleasantly familiar. My business was to make partition of a small property ...

• Drunkard's Dream, The    

  Being a Fourth Extract from the Legacy of the Late F. Purcell, P. P. of Drumcoolagh

• Ghost and the Bone-Setter, The

  In looking over the papers of my late valued and respected friend, Francis Purcell, who for nearly fifty years discharged the arduous duties of a parish priest in the south of Ireland, I met with the following document. It is one of many such, for he was a curious and industrious collecto ...

• Ghost Stories of Chapelizod

  Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror. You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an au ...

• Laura Silver Bell

  In the five Northumbrian counties you will scarcely find so bleak, ugly, and yet, in a savage way, so picturesque a moor as Dardale Moss. The moor itself spreads north, south, east, and west, a great undulating sea of black peat and heath.

• Schalken the Painter

       "For he is not a man as I am that
       we should come together; neither is
       there any that might lay his hand
       upon us both. Let him, therefore,
       take his rod away from me, and let
       not his fear terrify me."

• Stories of Lough Guir

  When the present writer was a boy of twelve or thirteen, he first made the acquaintance of Miss Anne Baily, of Lough Guir, in the county of Limerick. She and her sister were the last representatives at that place, of an extremely good old name in the county. They were both what is termed ...

• Vision of Tom Chuff, The

  At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around, one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which they stand, ...

• Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling

  CHAPTER I

About the Author

Irish journalist, novelists, and short story writer, called the father of the modern ghost story. Although Le Fanu was one of the most popular writers of the Victorian era, he is not so widely read anymore. Le Fanu's best-known works include Uncle Silas (1864), a suspense story, and The House by the Churchyard (1863), a murder mystery. His vampire story 'Carmilla,' which influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula, has been filmed several times.

"Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvelous, and a "reader" decidedly a more critical animal than a "listener." (from 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street', 1853)

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin into a wealthy family of Huguenot origins. Among his forebears was the playwright Richard Brinsley. His father, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, was a clergyman. Le Fanu started to write poems in his childhood. The life of the peasantry become familiar to him when his family moved to Abington, in County Limerick. In 1833 he entered Trinity College, where he read law and graduated in 1837. His first story, 'The Ghost and the Bone-Setter', appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1838. It also published many of his other stories in the following years, which were later collected in The Purcell Papers (1880). As a novelist Le Fanu made his debut with The Cock and Anchor (1845). The chronicle of old Dublin showed the influence of Walter Scott, whom Le Fanu greatly admired. In 'A Preliminary Word' in Uncle Silas (1864) Le Fanu emphasized that death, crime, and in some form, mystery, are essential elements in Scott's novels.

In 1837 Le Fanu joined the staff of the Dublin University Magazine. Two years later he was called to the Irish Bar. However, he never practiced, but created his career in journalism. He owned or part-owned several papers, including The Warden, the Protestant Guardian, Evening Packet, and the Dublin Evening Mail. In 1861 he became owner and editor of Dublin University Magazine, in which several of his works appeared in serialized form. During this period he published only one book, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851).

Le Fanu married in 1844 (in some sources 1843) Susanna Bennett; they had four children. The death of his wife in 1858 depressed deeply the author. He poured his pessimism into his horror stories, and became a recluse, nicknamed as 'The Invisible Prince' for his shyness and nocturnal lifestyle. Usually, after visiting his newspaper office, Le Fanu returned to his home in Merrion Square to write from midnight to dawn. Le Fanu's son, Brinsley, told later, that his father wrote mostly in bed, using copybooks for his manuscripts. He always had two candels by his side of on a small table. During the last years he rarely went out into city. Le Fanu died on February 7, 1873. His work fell nearly into oblivion until 1923, when the scholar and ghost story writer M.R. James published a collection of Le Fanu's stories under the title Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery.

--"Well, a corpse is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever saw. She had her fingers straight pointin' at me, and her back was crooked, round again wi' age. Says she:
--'Ye little limb! what for did ye say I killed the boy? I'll tickle ye till ye're stiff!'" (from 'Madam Crowl's Ghost,' 1870)

In some of Le Fanu's stories the strange events can be interpreted in many ways - as a sign of the spiritual world, or as manifestations of psychic phenomena and unconscious, or in an allegorical level. 'The Green Tea', one of his most famous tales, depicts the horrors of Reverend Jennings, who is pursued by an evil spirit, a phantom monkey, without any apparent reason. It jumps onto his Bible as he preches, but nobody else sees the awful presence haunting him. Finally Jennings cuts his throat with his razor. Doctor Hesselius concludes that Jennings drank too much green tea, which unluckily opened his patient's inner eye. In this idea Dr. Hesselius is guided by Swedenborg's book Arcana Caelestia, in which the Swedish philosopher wrote: "When man's interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight...." Around the time of the publication of the story, green tea was blamed, when a community of Canadian nuns had problems with overexcited nerves. Le Fanu himself drank strong tea copiously and frequently.

As a journalist Le Fanu opposed all attempts to loosen the political union between Ireland and the rest of the UK, but in his 14 novels he avoided the politics of his day. The novels did not have supernatural elements, although their atmosphere could be foreboding or hint to unexplained phenomena. Le Fanu himself said to his publisher, George Bentley, that he was striving for 'the equilibrium between natural and the super-natural, the super-natural phenomena being explained on natural theories - and people left to choose which solution they please.'

Uncle Silas created effectively suspense without ghosts. The protagonist is a young girl, Maude, whose mother has died. After the death of her wealthy father, the sinister Uncle Silas becomes her guardian. Silas has his own plans about Maude and the fortune she will inherit. He tries to force her to marry his son Dudley, who already has a wife. Dudley kills the frightening French governess, Madame de la Rougierre. Maude is saved. Uncle Silas was developed from a short story entitled 'A Passage from the Secret History of an Irish Countess' - Le Fanu often refashioned his tales. Several of his novels are actually expanded versions of his earlier short stories. 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street' was the first form of 'Mr. Justice Harbottle.' Its protagonist has sent an innocent man to be hanged.

'Carmilla' was published in the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872). Its erotic, especially lesbian undertones have been noted by many film directors, among them Roger Vadim. In the story Laura, the narrator, meets Carmilla first time in her childhood, and then again at the age of 19. 'Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. "Darling, darling," she murmured, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so."' Carmilla is a vampire, Countess Mircalla Karnstein, who has lived hundreds of years. However, first the narrator and her father do not believe in supernatural explanations. Eventually Carmilla is tracked to Karnstein castle where her grave is opened and she is killed with the ancient practice - a sharp stake is driven through her heart. Laura travels with her father to Italy, but she cannot forget Carmilla. 'It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations--sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.'

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.