My darling wife is gone. . . . She was the light of my life." His grief was inconsolable, and from this point on he retired from public life.
One obituary notice, quoted by Roy B. Stokes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, later remarked: "He vanished so entirely that Dublin, always ready with a nickname, dubbed him 'The Invisible Prince;' and indeed he was for long almost invisible, except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen, stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square; sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop poring over some rare black letter Astrology or Demonology." However, it is during the period of his seclusion that he produced his most enduring works of fiction.
Le Fanu sold the Dublin University Magazine, which had become the main outlet of his short fiction, in 1869. He died in 1873. Of the effect of the seclusion of his final years on his literary work, biographer Michael H.
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