Sheridan Le Fanu was the Dublin writer who shaped the modern ghost story. Here is his life, his best tales from Carmilla to Green Tea, and why he still chills.
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Ask most people to name an Irish writer of the supernatural and they will say Bram Stoker. But before there was Dracula, there was a quiet Dublin man who wrote some of the finest ghost stories in the English language. His name was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and every November I find myself back in his company.
He is not as famous as he deserves to be. Yet if you have ever enjoyed a ghost story where the fear creeps in slowly, and you are never quite sure what is real, you have felt his influence.
Who Was Sheridan Le Fanu?
Le Fanu was born in Dublin on 28 August 1814, into a family of Huguenot descent. Writing was in the blood: his great-uncle was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who wrote The School for Scandal. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman, and young Joseph spent his early years at the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, before the family moved to Abington in County Limerick.
Rural Limerick in the late 1820s and 1830s was a tense place, and the boy grew up surrounded by local stories, old houses and a sense of things just out of sight. All of that found its way into his fiction.
He studied at Trinity College Dublin and was called to the bar in 1839, but he never practised law. Journalism and fiction pulled him in instead. His first story, "The Ghost and the Bone-Setter", appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1838, and he went on to own or part-own several Dublin newspapers. In 1861 he bought the magazine that had first published him.
Grief and the "Invisible Prince"
In 1843 Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett. Her death in 1858 hit him very hard. Afterwards he withdrew from Dublin society and rarely left his home on Merrion Square, writing late into the night. Dubliners took to calling him "the Invisible Prince".
It is tempting to read his best work through that loss. His stories are full of people who are haunted from the inside, by guilt, by grief or by something they cannot explain to anyone else. Le Fanu died in Dublin on 7 February 1873 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
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Sheridan Le Fanu's Best Ghost Stories
If you are new to Le Fanu, these are the places I would start.
Carmilla (1872)
A lonely young woman called Laura, living in a remote castle in Styria, befriends a mysterious and beautiful guest. Carmilla is one of the first great vampire stories, published a full 25 years before Dracula. It is a novella, so you can read it in an evening or two, and it is far stranger and more tender than you might expect.
Green Tea
A gentle clergyman, the Reverend Mr Jennings, begins to see a small black monkey that follows him everywhere. Nobody else can see it. Is it a ghost, a demon, or his own mind? It is one of the most unsettling stories I know, because Le Fanu never lets you settle on an answer.
In a Glass Darkly
"Green Tea" and Carmilla both appear in this 1872 collection, along with "The Familiar", "Mr Justice Harbottle" and "The Room in the Dragon Volant". The stories are presented as cases from the papers of Dr Martin Hesselius, a doctor who studies the strange. He is one of the earliest "occult detectives" in fiction.
Uncle Silas (1864)
A full-length gothic mystery. A young heiress is sent to live with her sinister uncle in his crumbling house, and the dread builds chapter by chapter. There are no ghosts, strictly speaking, but it is every bit as frightening.
Schalken the Painter (1839)
One of his early tales, about a young painter whose sweetheart is married off to a strange and terrible man. It is short, eerie and a good taste of what was to come.
Why Le Fanu Still Chills
Le Fanu rarely shows you the monster in full. He gives you a sound in the corridor, a figure at the edge of a room, a narrator who might be losing his grip. Your own imagination does the rest, and that is far more frightening than any detailed description.
He also understood that the most haunted places are often ordinary ones. A quiet study. A coach on a country road. A comfortable house with one locked room. His Ireland is full of old houses and long shadows, and the past is never quite finished with anyone.
Le Fanu's Influence on Stoker and M. R. James
Bram Stoker was a fellow Dubliner, and as a young man he wrote theatre reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail, a paper Le Fanu part-owned. It is hard to read Carmilla and Dracula side by side without seeing the family resemblance.
Later, the great English ghost story writer M. R. James championed Le Fanu, placing him in the very first rank of ghost story writers. James even edited a collection of his lesser-known tales, Madam Crowl's Ghost, in 1923. If you love James, you owe it to yourself to read the man he admired.
What Writers Can Learn From Le Fanu
- Hold back. Suggest more than you show. A half-seen thing stays with the reader.
- Use a narrator who might be wrong. Doubt is a powerful source of fear.
- Let the setting work. A house, a road or a room can carry as much menace as a ghost.
- Haunt your characters from the inside. Guilt and grief make the supernatural hit harder.
If you are writing a ghost story of your own this winter, it helps to keep track of your rules, your characters and your creaking old houses in one place. That is why I built Story Bible Studio. And if you would rather tell a spooky tale with other people, start a chain on Chain Story Online, where each writer adds the next part.
Final Thoughts on Sheridan Le Fanu
Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the slow-burning, psychological ghost story, and the vampire tale that came before Dracula. He wrote about fear and loss with real feeling, and his best stories are as unsettling now as they were 150 years ago. Pour a cup of tea, perhaps not green, and start with Carmilla. For more Irish ghost stories and books, have a wander around Enda Storrie.
Next step: Writing a ghost story of your own? Grab the free Story Bible Starter Kit, try a collaborative tale on Chain Story Online, and compare the best writing apps.
Related reading: Irish Ghost Stories to Read on a Dark Winter's Night · Bram Stoker's Irish Roots: The Real Inspiration for Dracula
Enda Storrie is a writer and the creator of Story Bible, the planning journal and app for writers, and Chain Story Online, a free collaborative storytelling platform.
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