Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Abstract

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (b. 1814–d. 1873) was an Irish writer who worked across several genres, including historical fiction, nonfiction, sensation novels, short stories, and tales of mystery. Throughout his career, he worked as a journalist, editor, and writer, and he contributed to several newspapers and magazines. He is best remembered today, however, for his Gothic and horror stories, which were central to the development of the 19th-century ghost story. Born in Dublin in 1814 to a well-educated middle-class Protestant family of Huguenot origins, Le Fanu studied law at Trinity College, Dublin, where he became involved with the Dublin University Magazine. From January 1838 he began to publish a series of supernatural stories in the magazine under the pseudonym of the Catholic Father Francis Purcell. These early works, many of which comprised the germs of his later writings, were heavily influenced by the Romantic and Gothic movements of the time. They contain many early toposes of the ghost story tradition while exploring questions of Irish nationalism and political dissent. They were collected and published in 1880 in the anthology entitled The Purcell Papers. In 1843, Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett, and they had four children. He supported his family as a journalist, publisher, and writer of fiction, producing a series of short stories and historical novels, including The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847). After Susanna’s death in 1858, Le Fanu became something of a recluse, and after the subsequent death of his mother in 1861, he devoted himself to writing and publishing. In 1869, he became editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine and he was also an owner of a number of other newspapers. Among the many works he produced during this period, which emerged from his preoccupation with the supernatural and the boundaries between the living and the dead, are his 1864 Gothic novel Uncle Silas, and his 1872 novella Carmilla, which became part of his In A Glass Darkly collection and was an early work of vampire fiction in English. Le Fanu died of a heart attack in February 1873 at the age of 58. Although he had been a best-selling author for over twenty years, the body of his work fell from popular attention until the 20th-century ghost story writer M.R. James sought to reinstate Le Fanu with the publication of a collection of his stories in 1923, entitled Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories.