Sheridan Le Fanu

Sheridan Le Fanu: Terror Deliberately Left Unexplained

A Victorian clergyman drinks too much green tea and is thereafter followed everywhere by a small black monkey with glowing eyes that only he can see. Le Fanu never tells you whether the creature is a demon or a symptom. That refusal — the dual door left open onto both the natural and the supernatural — is the whole of his method, and it is why M. R. James, the finest ghost-story writer of the next generation, called another of his tales "the best ghost story ever written." Twenty-five years before *Dracula*, Le Fanu had already invented the modern vampire.

A Huguenot Boyhood in a Hostile Parish

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on 28 August 1814 at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a family of Huguenot, Irish and English descent, connected through his mother to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His father, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, was a Church of Ireland clergyman who served as chaplain at the Royal Hibernian Military School in Phoenix Park; the family moved there within a year of Joseph's birth. In 1826 they went to Abington, County Limerick, where his father held a rectorship.

His formal education was thin. A tutor gave him little; he taught himself out of his father's library, and by fifteen he was writing poetry. Then the Tithe War of 1831–36 broke the family. The parish contained roughly 6,000 Catholics and only a few dozen members of the Church of Ireland, and the enforced tithing that supported the rectory collapsed. After his father's death, debt was severe enough that the library — the thing that had made him a writer — had to be sold.

The Law Abandoned

He took his B.A. at Trinity College Dublin in 1836, studied law, and was called to the bar in 1839. He never practised. By 1838 he had already turned to journalism, contributing ghost stories to the *Dublin University Magazine*, beginning with "The Ghost and the Bone-Setter." The barrister's training was not wasted: his fiction is full of wills, entailments, disputed inheritances and men whose legal cunning is indistinguishable from evil.

The Proprietor

From 1840 he owned newspapers — the *Dublin Evening Mail*, *The Warder*, and others — and in 1861 became editor and proprietor of the *Dublin University Magazine*, which he ran until 1869. He was a Tory, but an awkward one. In 1847 he backed John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in their advocacy for famine relief, a position that cost him the Tory nomination for County Carlow in 1852. The man who would spend his career writing about hidden guilt had made his own public break with his class.

Merrion Square and the Death of Susanna

On 18 December 1844 he married Susanna Bennett, daughter of the barrister George Bennett and granddaughter of John Bennett, a justice of the Court of King's Bench; the future Home Rule League MP Isaac Butt witnessed the ceremony. Four children followed: Eleanor in 1845, Emma in 1846, Thomas in 1847, George in 1854. The family lived at Warrington Place near the Grand Canal, then in 1856 moved to 18 Merrion Square, his wife's parents' house, which he rented for £22 a year.

Susanna's condition deteriorated: neurotic symptoms, acute religious anxiety, grief compounded by deaths among her relatives. In April 1858 she suffered what was described as a hysterical attack and died the following day, in circumstances that were never made clear. The effect on Le Fanu was total. He stopped writing fiction altogether and did not resume until his mother died in 1861. He took what consolation he could from correspondence with his cousin Lady Gifford until her own death in the 1860s.

The Great Decade

What followed the silence was one of the more remarkable late bursts in Victorian fiction. *The House by the Churchyard* (1863) set its intrigue in Chapelizod near his childhood Phoenix Park. *Wylder's Hand* and *Uncle Silas* both appeared in 1864, the latter expanded from an earlier story, "Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess," and relocated to Derbyshire — a claustrophobic study of a girl imprisoned in the house of a guardian she cannot prove is a murderer. Then came *Guy Deverell* (1865), *All in the Dark* (1866), *The Tenants of Malory* (1867), *A Lost Name* (1868), *The Wyvern Mystery* (1869), *Checkmate* and *The Rose and the Key* (both 1871), *Chronicles of Golden Friars* (1871) and *Willing to Die* (1872). He was writing to feed magazines, and it shows in the weaker books.

Dr Hesselius and Carmilla

*In a Glass Darkly* (1872) is the masterpiece, five long stories framed as the case papers of the occult physician Dr Hesselius — arguably the first psychic detective. It contains "Green Tea" and its monkey; "The Familiar," which M. R. James rated above all other ghost stories; "Mr Justice Harbottle"; "The Room in the Dragon Volant," which turns on premature burial; and *Carmilla*, set in central Europe, in which a young woman is preyed upon by a female vampire who is also, unmistakably, in love with her. *Carmilla* popularised the female vampire and fed directly into Bram Stoker's *Dracula* in 1897.

Why Sheridan Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is restraint — an almost perverse willingness to withhold. Le Fanu built stories in which the reader can construct a complete natural explanation and a complete supernatural one and is never told which is correct, and he sustained that ambiguity across novel length as well as in short fiction. Britannica notes his celebrated ability to evoke the ominous atmosphere of a haunted house; the deeper trick is that his houses are haunted by the possibility of haunting.

The praise from practitioners is unusually strong. M. R. James judged him "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories." E. F. Benson wrote of "an awfulness which custom cannot stale... due... to Le Fanu's admirably artistic methods in setting and narration," concluding that "as a 'flesh-creeper' he is unrivalled." The scholar Jack Sullivan calls him "one of the most important and innovative figures in the development of the ghost story" and "the most skilful writer of supernatural fiction in English."

Note what those verdicts share: every one is bounded by genre. James does not say first rank among novelists; he says among writers of ghost stories. Benson praises method and effect, not thought. This is a claim about craft — pacing, withholding, the management of a reader's uncertainty — rather than about intellectual range, and Le Fanu's own output supplies the counter-evidence. Alongside *Uncle Silas* sit a dozen serialised three-deckers written to order and now read by almost nobody. His reputation collapsed after his death and had to be rebuilt decades later by admirers, chiefly Elizabeth Bowen and James himself. He is a genius of technique, and the technique happened to be one that everything after him would need.

Legacy

He died of a heart attack in Dublin on 7 February 1873, aged 58, and was buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery. The critic Russell Kirk floated the claim that he "is believed to have literally died of fright" but offered no corroborating detail — a legend that suits the work better than the evidence supports. Posthumous collections kept him in circulation: *The Purcell Papers* in 1880, *The Watcher and Other Weird Stories* in 1894, and *Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery* in 1923, edited by M. R. James. Oliver Onions took *The Hand of Kornelius Voyt* (1939) from *Uncle Silas*; the film producer Val Lewton built a house style on the same principle of indirect horror. In Ballyfermot, not far from where he grew up, a road and a park carry his name.