Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu , 1814-73, Irish author. He spent his early career as a journalist. In 1863, he began producing a series of stories noted for their reflections of Irish life and supernatural, mysterious atmosphere. His two best works are the novels The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864). Other works include In a Glass Darkly (1872) and The Purcell Papers (1880), both collections of stories.

Bibliography: See his ghost stories collected in Best Ghost Stories, ed. by E. F. Bleiler (1964); study by M. H. Begnal (1971) and W. McCormack (1980).

Le Fanu (pron. Léff-anew), J. S. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). By 1840 he had published a dozen or so stories (including ‘A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’) in the Dublin University Magazine. Thereafter, he became increasingly involved in Irish journalism as editor of the Warden and owner or part-owner of that and other papers. His first two novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and Torlogh O'Brien (1847), were in the tradition of Sir W. Scott and Ainsworth; and it was not until 1861 that his main output began with the serialization in the Dublin University Magazine, which he acquired in that year, of The House by the Churchyard. There followed Wylder's Hand (1864), Uncle Silas (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), The Tenants of Malory (1867), A Lost Name (1868), The Wyvern Mystery (1869), Checkmate (1871), The Rose and the Key (1871), and Willing to Die (1873). In 1872 appeared the remarkable collection of stories entitled In a Glass Darkly.

This century's revival of interest dates from the publication in 1923 of Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, a collection of forgotten tales by Le Fanu edited by M. R. James, who considered that Le Fanu ‘stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of Ghost stories’.