About Le Fanu:
Sheridan Le Fanu was born at No. 45
Lower Dominick Steet, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot origins. Both
his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley
Sheridan were playwrights.
His niece Rhoda Broughton would become a very
successful novelist. Within a year of his birth, his family moved to the Royal
Hibernian Military School in Phoenix Park, where his father, an Anglican
clergyman, was the chaplain of the establishment.
Phoenix Park and the adjacent
village and parish church of Chapelizod were to feature in Le Fanu's later
stories. Le Fanu studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, where he was elected
Auditor of the College Historical Society.
He was called to the bar in 1839,
but he never practiced and soon abandoned law for journalism. In 1838 he began
contributing stories to the Dublin University Magazine, including his first ghost story, entitled "A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the
Painter" (1839).
He became the owner of several newspapers from 1840,
including the Dublin Evening Mail and the Warder. In 1844 Le Fanu married
Susanna Bennett, the daughter of a leading Dublin barrister.
In 1847 he
supported John Mitchell and Thomas Meagher in their campaign against the indifference of the Government to the Irish Famine.
His support cost him the
nomination as Tory MP for County Carlow in 1852.
His personal life also became
difficult at this time, as his wife Susanna suffered from increasing neurotic
symptoms.
She died in 1858 in unclear circumstances and anguished excerpts
from Le Fanu's diaries suggest that he felt guilt as well as loss.
However, it
was only after her death that, becoming something of a recluse, he devoted
himself full time to writing.
In 1861 he became the editor and proprietor of
the Dublin University Magazine and he began exploiting double exposure: serializing
in the Dublin University Magazine and then revising for the English market.
The
House by the Churchyard and Wylder's Hand were both published in this way.
After the lukewarm reviews of the former novel, set in the Phoenix Park area of
Dublin, Le Fanu signed a contract with Richard Bentley, his London publisher,
which specified that future novels be stories "of an English subject and
of modern times", a step Bentley thought necessary in order for Le Fanu to
satisfy the English audience.
Le Fanu succeeded in this aim in 1864, with the
publication of Uncle Silas, which he set in Derbyshire.
In his very last short
stories, however, Le Fanu returned to Irish folklore as an inspiration and
encouraged his friend Patrick Kennedy to contribute folklore to the D.U.M. Le
Fanu died in his native Dublin on February 7, 1873.
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