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 much more personal, intimate, and realistic use of Gothicism. For the most part avoiding the excesses of the Gothic novel, he transformed the Gothic props, such as castles, dizzying landscapes, and villains, into subtle, haunting, quiet tales of terror utilizing the techniques of realistic fiction. For this reason his prominent position in ghost fiction cannot be underestimated.

The opportunity Le Fanu had to transform the Gothic arose from his position in an Anglo-Irish ascendant class. He was descended from French Huguenots who fled France upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which under Louis XIV exiled all Protestants from the country. On his father's side, he was the...