Sheridan le Fanu
1814-1873

Le Fanu was born in Dublin on 28 August l814. A grand nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1839, but preferred a career in journalism, eventually amalgamating three newspapers into the Dublin Evening Mail, over which he presided until his death. He also became editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine in 1861. Le Fanu married in 1844, but on his wife's death in 1858 became increasingly reclusive.

His earliest work appeared in the Dublin University Magazine, a series of Irish stories (1838-40) later collected as The Purcell Papers (1880). He also wrote the popular ballads 'Phaudrig Crohoore' and 'Shamus O'Brien', the latter regularly recited by Samuel Lover during his tours. His first historical novels, The Cock and Anchor (1845) and Torlogh O'Brien (1847) published anonymously, were received with indifference.

Le Fanu had published Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery in 1851, and following his wife's death the grieving author became increasingly preoccupied with death and the supernatural. He mostly wrote in bed, between midnight and dawn, and eventually was so seldom seen that friends called him 'the Invisible Prince'.

A prolific period as novelist began with The House by the Churchyard (1863), set in Chapelizod near his first home in Phoenix Park. It is a masterly eighteenth-century tale of murder and miscarriage of justice and, like most of his later novels, it was first serialised in the Dublin University Magazine. Thereafter, Le Fanu turned to the Victorian period and in 1864 published both Wylder's Hand, another mystery, and his best-known Gothic novel, Uncle Silas, in which a guardian plots to murder his niece for her fortune. Silas Ruthyn is the most striking of Le Fanu's many villains and has since appeared in stage adaptations and in a 1947 film.

The best of his other novels are Guy Deverell (1865) and Checkmate (1870). In a Glass Darkly (1872) is an interesting collection of stories linked by Dr Hesselius, a student of psychiatry and the occult; among them is 'Carmilla', a story of vampirism which Bram Stoker read as a young man. Le Fanu's last novel Willing to Die, was completed a few days before his death in Dublin on 7 February 1873.

From the Appletree Press title: Famous Irish Writers.
Also from Appletree: The House By The Churchyard and Irish Museums and Heritage Centres.