Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: biography

Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish journalist, essayist, mystery novelist, and writer of supernatural stories.

Sheridan le Fanu was a journalist, essayist, mystery novelist, and writer of supernatural stories.

Influences

Le Fanu was educated at home by his father, who was the Dean of the Irish Episcopal Church. He studied law at Trinity College but never practised it, preferring to write instead.

Le Fanu greatly admired the works of Walter Scott and tried to follow in his steps. His earliest published works included two historical novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847). These did not attract much attention, as it is possible that his ambition to be the Irish Walter Scott was not yet matched by his skill at that time. While well-researched and containing excellent descriptions, critics noted the following weaknesses:

• exaggeration of characters,
• characters lack depth,
• scenes of excessive cruelty.

The last point applies especially to Torlogh O’Brien, which even Le Fanu’s strongest defender M. R. James described as unreadable.

Le Fanu also respected mystery novelist Wilkie Collins, and it has been suggested that he followed Collins in style and design. Both novelists share skills in creating atmosphere and suspense, but it has been debated whether Le Fanu thought of Collins as his master.

On one thing many critics and supporters agree: Le Fanu’s characters in his early work tend to lack credibility. But while le Fanu’s early works may lack the vitality of Colllins in characterisation, they make up for it in atmosphere. Le Fanu uses a wide range of devices, including:

• Arrivals and departures ‘at dead of night’/in secret.
• Storms and tempests (usually at night).
• Haunted houses.
• Lighting: dark corridors lit by one candle alone.

Reception

Critics praised both Le Fanu’s supernatural atmosphere and his accurate descriptions of everyday life.

He was considered a ‘sensation’ novelist, something he denied in his preface to Uncle Silas, in which he asks for:

In later works, Le Fanu also tried to depict the thoughts and psychology of his characters, which set him apart from his contemporaries.

Sheridan Le Fanu's novels and tales

In 1858, Le Fanu’s wife Susanna died, and Le Fanu withdrew from society, earning himself the nickname ‘The Invisible Prince’. At the same time, this new period saw his creative writing take off and his most important work written.

In 1863, his first novel in over ten years, The House by the Churchyard, was published, followed by Uncle Silas in 1864. Both of these are mystery novels.

The House by the Churchyard combines mystery and detection when a battered skull is accidentally dug up in a graveyard. The novel is then told as a flashback, as the events leading up to the mystery are reconstructed. Uncle Silas is a mystery novel in the gothic tradition, which features a large creepy mansion, a wicked uncle and his oafish son, a child heiress, a terrifying governess, and plenty of intrigue.

Uncle Silas is also interesting for the similarities it shares with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859). In Uncle Silas, the heroine is tricked into believing she has travelled from her uncle’s house to another city when in fact, under the influence of a drug, she is brought back to the house.

In The Woman in White, a similar ploy is used: Laura, one of the heroines, is persuaded to travel to London after being told her sister Marian is already there. She and her housekeeper check her sister’s room to find it empty, and so Laura leaves. Her housekeeper later discovers Marian has been transferred to another wing of the house while unconscious.

Both Collins and Le Fanu are masters of suspense – Collins is more dramatic and realistic (this is understandable as he also wrote for the stage), while Le Fanu is more subtle, idealistic and

In 1872, his novels were followed by a collection of short stories called ‘In A Glass Darkly’, which is considered his best work. The stories are told as ‘cases’, collected by a fictional psychiatrist Dr Hesselius and are titled as follows:

• Green Tea.
• The Familiar.
• Mr Justice Harbottle.
• The Room in the Dragon Volant.
• Carmilla.

After the death of his wife Susanna, Le Fanu sought comfort in the writings of Swedenborg (1749–1771), who refers to death as a ‘change’ or transition, a continuation of life in an altered way. However, less comfortingly perhaps, Swedenborg also refers to ‘an inner eye’ that everyone possesses. Once opened, it can allow us entrance to the world of spirits.

It is this ‘inner eye’ that Le Fanu uses as a framework for his stories, in particular the first three (Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr Justice Harbottle).

In Green Tea, a clergyman is pursued by a phantom monkey; in The Familiar, an army captain is haunted by a guilty past; and in Mr Justice Harbottle, a cruel judge endures nightmarish visions of his own cruelty.

In all of these, Dr Hesselius suggests his ‘patients’ have been suffering from some form of hallucination. The perspective shifts with the last two stories: the ‘other realm’ is accessed but in a more physical, direct way. In Dragon Volant, Beckett, the central character, is buried alive (and then rescued), and in Carmilla, there is a real vampire, the undead Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, who stalks the living 150 years after her burial.

Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla

Carmilla is set in Styria, yet Laura, the narrator, claims to be English, although her mother was descended from the Karnsteins, whose ruined castle lies in the area. Laura and her father live isolated in another castle with an abandoned village. The villagers, fearing vampires, have left the village. They receive news from a family friend, a general, who is to visit them with his niece, who has suddenly died under mysterious circumstances, which their friend will explain on his arrival.

Meanwhile, a carriage accident occurs outside the castle. Its passengers are a young girl called Carmilla and her mother. Carmilla is injured and is left in the care of Laura and her father, while Carmilla’s mother continues on her urgent journey.

The mysterious Carmilla reveals nothing about herself and has a tendency to sleep all day and sleepwalk at night. Laura falls ill, and the doctor observes two puncture marks on her neck and warns her father. They meet up with the General, who explains his niece had been the victim of a vampire. His description matches Carmilla, and they find the tomb of Carmilla (who is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein) and destroy the body after driving a stake through her heart and beheading her.

Much of Carmilla contains the tropes later used by fellow Dubliner Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897): the isolated castle, the beautiful female turned vampire, the stake, the beheading. Stoker originally intended to open his story with ‘Dracula’s Guest’, which contains a reference to another Countess in le Fanu’s ‘Styria’. However, his publisher thought it announced the Count too prematurely. ‘Dracula’s Guest’ appeared in a collection of stories instead (Bram Stoker, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, 1914).

Robert Tracy suggests Carmilla conceals a backstory of political anxiety. Le Fanu, as an Anglo-Irish, was apprehensive of the rising power of the Catholic Irish nationalists. In his story, according to Robert Tracy, Laura and her father represent the diminishing Anglo-Irish landowners, whose abandoned village

Any more ghost stories?

Le Fanu continued to run, and act as editor of, the Dublin University Magazine and, when not writing, was an avid collector of ghost stories.

Le Fanu would write at night by the light of two candles, doze off, wake up at 2.00 am, make himself some strong tea, and write again for a couple of hours.

A year after In A Glass Darkly, his final novel, Willing to Die, was published. This is perhaps his most ambitious work and is more melancholic than his previous novels. Although it contains elements of mystery (including shipwreck, lost and found fortunes, villains, and romance), the heroine, Ethel, lives through extremes of poverty and despair to the point of suicide and finishes with a fortune that she is too broken in spirit to enjoy.

Whether owing to his writing/sleeping habits, Le Fanu seems to have suffered from a recurring nightmare about an old mansion crumbling in upon him. When he died in 1873, his doctor is supposed to have said, ‘I feared this – that house fell at last!’ Yet, according to a note his daughter sent to his cousin, Le Fanu passed away peacefully: