Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Life

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814 into a family of Huguenot descent; his grandmother was the sister of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman, and the family moved in 1826 to Abington in County Limerick, where the boy grew up during the agrarian violence of the Tithe War, an experience that gave him a lasting sense of a Protestant minority under threat. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin and was called to the bar in 1839 but never practiced, turning to journalism instead.

Le Fanu bought into several Dublin newspapers and in 1861 became editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine, in which much of his fiction first appeared. He published his first ghost stories in the magazine in the late 1830s and his first novels in the 1840s. He married Susanna Bennett in 1844; her death in 1858, after years of anxiety and religious doubt, left him shaken, and he withdrew from Dublin society so completely that he was nicknamed the Invisible Prince. The novels and stories for which he is remembered were almost all written in the fifteen years that followed: The House by the Churchyard (1863), Uncle Silas (1864), and the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), which contains Carmilla and Green Tea. He died in Dublin in 1873.

Literary significance

Le Fanu is the leading Irish writer of Victorian ghost and mystery fiction and a key figure between the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century and the modern horror story. Uncle Silas is a landmark of the sensation novel and of the locked-house mystery. In a Glass Darkly, framed as cases from the papers of a German doctor of the occult, contains his most lasting work: Green Tea, a study of a haunting that may be psychological, and Carmilla, the vampire tale that preceded Dracula by twenty-five years and influenced Bram Stoker. M. R. James, the dominant English ghost-story writer of the next generation, regarded Le Fanu as the best in the form and edited a collection of his stories in 1923.

Where to start

Carmilla, in our catalog, is short and shows his method at its best. Readers who want more should look for Green Tea and then Uncle Silas.