Books with author J. Sheridan LeFanu

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on August 28th, 1814, at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family with Huguenot, Irish and English roots. The children were tutored but, according to his brother William, the tutor taught them little if anything. Le Fanu was eager to learn and used his father's library to educate himself about the world. He was a creative child and by fifteen had taken to writing poetry. Accepted into Trinity College, Dublin to study law he also benefited from the system used in Ireland that he did not have to live in Dublin to attend lectures, but could study at home and take examinations at the university as and when necessary. This enabled him to also write and by 1838 Le Fanu's first story The Ghost and the Bonesetter was published in the Dublin University Magazine. Many of the short stories he wrote at the time were to form the basis for his future novels. Indeed, throughout his career Le Fanu would constantly revise, cannabilise, embellish and re-publish his earlier works to use in his later efforts. Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu had written and published twelve stories which purported to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. Set mostly in Ireland they include classic stories of gothic horror, with grim, shadowed castles, as well as supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, together with madness and suicide. One of the themes running through them is a sad nostalgia for the dispossessed Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, whose ruined castles stand in mute salute and testament to this history. On 18 December 1844 Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett, the daughter of a leading Dublin barrister. The union would produce four children. Le Fanu was now stretching his talents across the length of a novel and his first was The Cock and Anchor published in 1845. A succession of works followed and his reputation grew as well as his income. Unfortunately, a decade after his marriage it became an increasing source of difficultly. Susanna was prone to suffer from a range of neurotic symptoms including great anxiety after the deaths of several close relatives, including her father two years before. In April 1858 she suffered an "hysterical attack" and died in circumstances that are still unclear. The anguish, profound guilt as well as overwhelming loss were channeled into Le Fanu’s work. Working only by the light of two candles he would write through the night and burnish his reputation as a major figure of 19th Century supernaturalism. His work challenged the focus on the external source of horror and instead he wrote about it from the perspective of the inward psychological potential to strike fear in the hearts of men. A series of books now came forth: Wylder's Hand (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), The Tenants of Malory (1867), The Green Tea (1869), The Haunted Baronet (1870), Mr. Justice Harbottle (1872), The Room in the Dragon Volant (1872) and In a Glass Darkly. (1872). But his life was drawing to a close. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu died in Merrion Square in his native Dublin on February 7th, 1873, at the age of 58.

The foremost teller of scary stories in his day and a profound influence on both the novelists and filmmakers of the 20th century, Anglo-Irish author JOSEPH THOMAS SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814–1873) has, sadly, fallen out of scholarly and popular favor, and unfairly so. To this day, contemporary readers who happen across his works praise his talent for weaving a tense literary atmosphere tinged by the supernatural and bolstered by hints of ambiguous magic. First published in 1864, Uncle Silas, one of his more famous works, is a macabre tale of the death-haunted mansion known as Knowl, and Maud Ruthyn, who narrates for us the ominous goings-on there through her curtain of obsession with the dark and the dead. Considered by some to be among the best horror novels ever written, this is certainly a pinnacle of Victorian suspense that continues to grip sophisticated readers today. With a series of new editions of Le Fanu’s works, Cosimo is proud to reintroduce modern book lovers to the writings of the early master of suspense fiction who pioneered the concept of “psychological horror.”

"A short . . . but most masterly story, [with] The Room in the Dragon Volant, he touched the springs of terror and suspense, as perhaps no other writer of fiction in the language has been able to do. His fine scholarship, poetic sense, and strong, yet delicate handling of language and of incident give these tales a place quite apart among works of sensational fiction. --THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE "The immobilized consciousness of young Beckett in 'The Room in the Dragon Volant' should be read as the counterpart of a lascivious and protean immortality in 'Carmilla'." -- J.W. McCormack

"J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). 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." -- Books and Writers.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Addicted to laudanum and prey to inexplicable visions, Silas appears like a spirit to his neice Maud. Silas has his own plans for Maud and the fortune she will inherit. Uncle Silas is LeFanu's best-known novel, dealing with themes of spiritualism, secret corruption, greed, lust, and other peculiar Victorian obsessions. A classic novel of spiritual terror by opne of the true masters of the form.

At the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, wealthy British heir Richard Beckett decides to spend some time in France. On his way there, he stumbles across an overturned carriage and encounters two people who will alter the course of his life. Afterwards, he makes his way to a nearby inn -- and unknowingly checks himself into a room that is believed to be cursed.

In Uncle Silas, Sheridan Le Fanu’s most celebrated novel, Maud Ruthyn, the young, naïve heroine, is plagued by Madame de la Rougierre from the moment the enigmatic older woman is hired as her governess. A liar, bully, and spy, when Madame leaves the house, she takes her dark secret with her. But when Maud is orphaned, she is sent to live with her Uncle Silas, her father’s mysterious brother and a man with a scandalous-even murderous-past. And, once again, she encounters Madame, whose sinister role in Maud’s destiny becomes all too clear. With its subversion of reality and illusion, and its exploration of fear through the use of mystery and the supernatural, Uncle Silas shuns the conventions of traditional horror and delivers a chilling psychological thriller.