Sheridan Le Fanu

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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (August 28, 1814 – February 7, 1873) was an Irish writer of short stories and mystery novels. His ghost stories are an early example of the genre of horror fiction in its modern form, in which (as in the famous tale "Schalken the Painter"), virtue does not always triumph and easy explanations for supernatural occurrences are not always forthcoming.

Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin to a noble family. His grandmother Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and her brother, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (J. Sheridan Le Fanu's great-uncle), were both playwrights. His niece, Rhoda Broughton, would become a very successful novelist.

Le Fanu studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, where he was elected Auditor of the College Historical Society, and passed the bar 1839. But Le Fanu did not take up the legal profession, instead becoming a journalist. Thenceforth until his death he published stories. From 1861--1869, he edited Dublin University Magazine, which also published many of his works in serial form. He owned several periodicals (including the Dublin University Magazine and the Dublin Evening Mail) in his late life. He died in his native Dublin on February 7, 1873.

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His work

Le Fanu's plots are well-crafted and vivid. He specialised in tone and effect rather than shock horror, often following a mystery format. Yet to delicate sensibilities, tales such as the vampire novella Carmilla can be profoundly effective.

Carmilla was to greatly influence Bram Stoker in the writing of Dracula. A very early work, A Chapter in the History of the Tyrone Family (1839), may have influenced Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. He is sometimes said to be the father of the Victorian Irish ghost story. Considering the influence of his work, it is surprising that Le Fanu is not better appreciated.

His best-known works, still read today, are the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas (1864), "The Rose and the Key" (1871), and the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), which contains Carmilla as well as "Green Tea" and "The Familiar", two famous stories of enigmatic hauntings apparently provoked by obscure guilt.

Other fiction by Le Fanu includes: The Purcell Papers, divided into three volumes; The House by the Churchyard (1863); Wylder's Hand (1864);Guy Deverell (1865); Haunted Lives (1868); The Wyvern Mystery (1869); and the posthumously published The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (1894), another collection of short stories.

There is an extensive critical analysis of Le Fanu's work in Jack Sullivan's book Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978).

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