J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin on 28 August 1814 into a Huguenot-descended family of clergymen and writers; the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan was his great-uncle. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman, and Le Fanu spent much of his childhood in County Limerick, where his father was dean of Emly, during the violent “Tithe War” of the early 1830s against the tithes paid to that church. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and qualified as a barrister, but never practised, and turned to journalism instead.

His first stories appeared in the Dublin University Magazine from 1838, presented as papers left by a fictional Catholic priest, Father Purcell. One of the earliest, Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter, is already fully characteristic: a story told at second hand, about a bargain no one in it fully understands. He bought into and edited several Dublin newspapers, and from 1861 to 1869 he owned the Dublin University Magazine itself.

His wife, Susanna, died in 1858 after years of illness and religious anxiety. Le Fanu withdrew from society afterward and became known in Dublin as “the Invisible Prince.” Most of his major work comes from the fifteen years that followed, including the novels The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864), much of it reportedly written at night in bed. He died in Dublin on 7 February 1873.

His last collection, In a Glass Darkly (1872), frames five stories as cases from the papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a “metaphysical physician.” Three of them are here: Green Tea, about a clergyman haunted by a small black monkey; The Familiar; and Mr. Justice Harbottle. The fifth is the novella Carmilla, which came twenty-five years before Dracula and gave the vampire story much of its shape, including its isolated Styrian setting and the predator who first appears as a guest.

M. R. James wrote that he “stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories” and edited a collection of his forgotten tales, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923); the title story is Madam Crowl's Ghost. If you’re starting out, Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street, a haunted Dublin lodging house, is the most purely frightening. “Green Tea” is the most modern.