Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu wrote fifteen novels, ranging from historical romances to mysteries, as well as essays, poetry, patriotic ballads, sentimental lyrics, and journalistic pieces. Yet it is largely for his more than forty short stories--often...

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's contribution to supernatural horror fiction is signally important because he was virtually the first writer to produce ghost stories in Britain. Emerging shortly after the heyday of the Gothic novel, Le Fanu's work offered a...

During his lifetime Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a moderately successful novelist in terms of both critical acclaim and the sales of his books. After his death his reputation slid into the typical decline, and only two or three of his novels remained in...

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - (1814 - 1873) (Also wrote under the pseudonyms Charles de Cresserons and Reverend Francis Purcell) Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and editor. Le Fanu is a major figure among Victorian-era authors of...

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (August 28, 1814 – February 7, 1873) was an Anglo-Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and had a seminal influence on the development of this genre...

Governesses in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu were significantly unlike most Victorian portrayals of this profession. The governesses in Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre,' Anne Bronte's 'Agnes Grey,' and Henry James's 'Turn of the Screw' were exploited, abused, overworked and socially ignored. Le Fanu...

A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.1 a dream is not...

In the following excerpt, Begnal praises Le Fanu's contributions to Irish literature, particularly the four novels Le Fanu wrote between 1863 and 1865.

In the following excerpt, Sullivan compares Le Fanu's novel The House by the Churchyard to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, discussing the two writers' shared ideas and sympathies.

In the excerpt that follows, Kenton presents Le Fanu as an important supernatural fiction writer and suggests a renewed interest in Le Fanu based on connections between his and the Brontës' writings.