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J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) | |
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Irish journalist, novelists, and short story writer, called the father of the modern ghost story. Although Sheridan 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. "But to die as lovers may — to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see — each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room." ('Carmilla,' In a Glass Darkly: Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, with an introduction by V. S. Pritchett, London: John Lehmann, 1947, p. 246; first published in the Dark Blue magazine, 1871-1872) Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin into a wealthy family of Huguenot origins. Among his forebears was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). His father, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, was a clergyman at the Royal Hibernian Military School. Le Fanu started to write poems in his childhood. The life of the peasantry became familiar to him when his family moved to Abington, in County Limerick. In 1833 Le Fanu entered Trinity College, where he read law and graduated in 1837. L Fanu's 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 many of his works came out 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, the daughter of Dublin barrister. The marriage was
happy, they had four children. The death of his wife in April 1858
depressed deeply the author, but at the same time liberated his
creative energies, which he poured into his stories. The circumstaces
of her death remain unclear. She was reported to have died from
hystreria. Le Fanu wrote in his diary that she was "always doubting
& sometimes actually disbelieving my love – although I was there
both declaring & showing it – Day & night." (quoted
in J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A
Bio-Bibliography by Gary William Crawford, Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press Greenwood Press, 1995, p. 6) Nicknamed
as 'The Invisible Prince' for his shyness and
nocturnal lifestyle, Le Fanu lived a reclusive life. Usually, after
visiting his newspaper office, Le Fanu returned to his home at 18
Merrion
Square to pen his stories from midnight to dawn. His 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.
Sheridan Le Fanu died of a heart attack on February 10, 1873, in his
home in
Dublin. He was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery. At the time of his death, he was in debt; there was no
property, only "paintings of the past, engraved silver, relics," and
his children had to leave their home. 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. "He stands absolutely in
the first rank s a writer of ghosts stories," James said. "That is my
deliberate verdict, after reading all the supernatural tales I have
been able to get hold of. Nobodu sets the scene better than he, nobody
touches in the effective detail more deftly." ('Introduction'
by M. R. James, in Madam Crowl's
Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu,
collected and edited by M. R. James, London: Wordsworth Editions, 1994) 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. It has been said that
the author's guilt over his wife's death influenced stories in In a
Glass Darkly (1872). 'The Green Tea,' perhaps Le Fanu's most famous tale, 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 Martin
Hesselius, who describes himself as a metaphysical physician,
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 Cœlestia,
in which the Swedish
philosopher wrote: "It has been given me to see by internal sight the
things in the other life more clearly than I see the things in the
world. From all this it is evident that external sight comes forth from
interior sight, and this from sight still more interior, and so on." (Arcana Coelestia: The
Heavenly Arcana, translated from the Latin by Emanuel
Swedenborg, New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1941, p. 496) 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. Originally the
story was published in serial form in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round in 1869. 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
fictio 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
the natural and the super-natural, the super-natural phenomena
being explained on natural theories – and
people left to choose which solution they please." (cited
in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall
of the English Ghost Story by Julia Briggs, London: Faber, 1977,
p. 49) 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,' a pathbreaking vampire story, was collected in In
a Glass Darkly. "How is it that Le Fanu’s stories avoid the curse of explanation?" asked V. S. Pritchett.
"The answer is, first of all, that Le Fanu is very subtle in his
handling of explanation; he either conceals it or distracts our
attention from it; and, secondly, that the explanation is implicit and
not the overt point or climax of the story." ('Introduction' by V. S. Pritchett, In a Glass Darkly: Stories, p. 19) 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."" (Ibid., p. 248) 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." (Ibid., p. 288) The erotic, especially lesbian undertones of 'Carmilla' have been noted by many film directors. Roger Vadim's Et mourir de plaisir (1960, Blood and Roses) was shot in the vicinity of Rome. The director's wife Annette was cast in the role Carmilla, Mel Ferrer was Leopoldo de Karnstein. "Claude Renoir's superbly pastoral color photography of the Roman foot-hills, with their stately poplars and gnarled olive trees, and a truly imaginative use of the ancient Hadrian's Villa as a key backdrop, spice the plot with strange, antiquated pull." ('Blood and Roses' by Howard Thompson, The New York Times, October 12, 1961) Carl Dreyer's moody screen adaptation, Vampyr (1931), filmed by Rudolph Máte, mixes surrealistic images with themes of death and redemption. A piece of gauze was held in front of the camera lens to create a haunting, misty look. The vampire is an old woman (Henriette Gérard). For further reading: The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature: A Feast of Blood, edited by Brooke Cameron and Lara Karpenko (2022); 'Blood Doubles: A Renegotiation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla on Film' by Shelby Wilson, in Queer/Adaptation : A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Pamela Demory (2019); The Irish Vampire: from Folklore to the Imaginations of Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker by Sharon M. Gallagher (2017); Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction by Jen Cadwallader (2016); Women's Sexual Liberation from Victorian Patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla by Ilona Gaul (2007); J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography by Gary William Crawford (1995); Sheridan Le Fanu by Ivan Melada (1987); Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian England by W.J. McCormack (1980); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu by Michael H. Begnal (1971); Sheridan Le Fanu by Nelson Browne (1951); Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others by S.M. Ellis (1931) Selected works:
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