Sheridan Le Fanu

Irish · 1814 to 1873

Born Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu on August 28, 1814, in Dublin, to a Huguenot family long settled in Ireland, he was the grandnephew of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman, and the boy grew up in the Royal Hibernian Military School in Phoenix Park, then in rural Limerick, where the unrest of the Tithe War left an early mark. He read law at Trinity College Dublin and was called to the bar in 1839, but turned instead to journalism, eventually owning several Dublin newspapers including the Dublin University Magazine. He married Susanna Bennett in 1844; her death in 1858, amid what may have been a religious crisis, deepened the seclusion that earned him the local name "the Invisible Prince." He wrote at night, in bed, by candlelight, often after waking from sleep, drawing on Swedenborgian visions of an encroaching spirit world. The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Wylder's Hand (1864) established him, but his reputation rests on Uncle Silas (1864), a long sensation novel of a girl imprisoned by a sinister guardian, and on the tales collected in In a Glass Darkly (1872), among them "Green Tea" and "Carmilla," a vampire story that preceded Dracula by a quarter century and shaped it. He published roughly fourteen novels and many shorter pieces. He died on February 7, 1873, in his house at 18 Merrion Square, Dublin, at the age of fifty-eight, reportedly after a nightmare he had long dreaded, his physician remarking that the house that fell had killed him at last.