Our Pages - Author Profiles - Sheridan Le Fanu
A Little About Sheridan Le FanuSheridan Le Fanu hails from a family of famous and successful writers, so it is with no great surprise that he should follow suit. His grandmother, Irish playwright Alicia Sheridan LeFanu, was the daughter of the Anglo-Irish novelist and playwright Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan and Irish writer, stage actor and former theatre director Thomas Sheridan. Alicia Sheridan LeFanu was also the sister of Irish playwright and poet Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Sheridan Le Fanu's great-uncle who was a long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), and the aunt of Irish poet and writer Alicia LeFanu (with whom she is sometimes confused). Thomas Sheridan himself was the godson of Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and poet of Gulliver's Travels fame. The successful Welsh novelist and short-story writer Rhoda Broughton was Sheridan Le Fanu's niece.
However, after lukewarm reviews of The House By The Churchyard, which was set in the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, Ireland, Sheridan Le Fanu was forced to sign a contract with Richard Bentley, his London publisher. The contract specified that future novels be stories "of an English subject and of modern times". Richard Bentley thought this specification necessary for Sheridan Le Fanu to satisfy the English readers. He was proved right, with the successful publication of Uncle Silas in 1864, a story set in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England. In his very last short stories, however, Sheridan Le Fanu returned to Irish folklore as an inspiration.
Sheridan Le Fanu died in his native Dublin on 7 February 1873 at the age of 58. Today, there is a road and a park named after him in Ballyfermot, a suburb in the city of Dublin, near his childhood home in south-west Dublin.
|
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu
Born: 28 August 1814, Dublin, Ireland Died: 7 February 1873 (aged 58), Dublin, Ireland Genres: Gothic Horror, Mystery, Dark Romanticism Sheridan Le Fanu worked in many genres but remains best known for his mystery and horror fiction. An Irish writer of Gothic tales, he was, in point of fact, the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and was instrumental in developing the genre in the Victorian era. The grandfather of ghostly tales, Sheridan Le Fanu was a great influence on other famous writers namely James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë. Perhaps more prominently was his enormous influence on the 20th century's most prolific ghost-story writer, M R James.
Sheridan Le Fanu's first story, The Ghost And The Bone-Setter, appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in January 1838, the first of twelve instalments of the Purcell Papers (1880). He was to become a regular contributor to this magazine, an independent literary, cultural and political magazine published in Dublin from 1833 to 1882, which started out as a magazine of political commentary but increasingly became devoted to literature. Subsequently in 1840 he became the owner of several newspapers, including the Dublin Evening Mail (renamed the Evening Mail in 1928) and the Warder.
Then in 1861, Sheridan Le Fanu took over the Dublin University Magazine and became its editor and proprietor. This move allowed him to take advantage of double-publication; first serializing his stories in the magazine, then revising them as novels for the English market. The House By The Churchyard (1863) and Wylder's Hand (1864) was first published using this method.
|
|
|
Copyright © 2014 British Mysteries Emporium. All Rights Reserved.