ࡱ> =?<%` bjbjNN .&,, ****************$L+h-;***;***P******  *f*0*... *,V,***;*;* ****r r  The Book of Irish Writers, Chapter 26 - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1814-1873 Beneath the outward respectability of middle-class Protestant Ireland in the nineteenth century, gothic secrets lurked. A number of writers from conventional backgrounds created what the novelist Elizabeth Bowen would call romances of terror! Foremost among these was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - whose reclusive tendencies in later life earned him the name The Invisible Prince. Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814. His father was a Church of Ireland curate and his mother was the daughter of a clergyman. Le Fanu initially grew up in Phoenix Park, but the family moved to Limerick when he was 12, at a time of increasing violence in the countryside - tenants were showing their rage against the landlords. It was in while living in Limerick that Le Fanu encountered local oral traditions and supernatural tales. Le Fanu went on to train in Law at Trinity College, though he would make his living as a newspaper editor and proprietor. His first stories appeared in the Dublin University Magazine when he was in his mid-twenties. Although anonymous publication was common practice, Le Fanu invented a persona, Fr Francis Purcell, a catholic priest, to narrate his early tales. This is a typically gothic technique: the story is distanced like a story heard from a friend of a friend - and yet simultaneously the narrators authority guarantees that the events described are real, despite their supernatural aspects. The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh a tale of demonic possession - is typical; Sir Robert has sold his soul for vast wealth but must eventually pay his debt to the devil. Le Fanu married at the age of 30, though the marriage was not a happy one - largely because his of his wife, Susannas, deteriorating neurotic condition. Protests about Londons indifference to the effects of the Famine briefly united Le Fanu with radicals such as John Mitchel, but his politics were consistently conservative and unionist. It was in the wake of the Famine that Le Fanu found his own literary voice in a volume called Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery - published in 1851. His wifes health, especially her mental health, was failing in these years and when she died in 1858, he was left with the care of four young children. Now in his mid forties, he became increasingly reclusive. Le Fanus income was always uncertain, despite his stake in various newspapers. His fiction writing became more prolific in the early 1860s. By this stage he had acquired the Dublin University Magazine and would use it to serialise some of his best work before publication in book form. His best-known novel Uncle Silas appeared in 1864. Although the novel is set in Derbyshire, it looks back to the Irish big house novel. If early nineteenth-century national tales presented the Union of Britain and Ireland as a marriage, gothic tales like Uncle Silas - show the family inevitably breaking down. The novel is narrated by the heroine Maud Ruthyn. Maud is made a ward of her Uncle Silas, who has a dubious past and stands to gain a fortune if she dies. The story depends for its effects on Mauds innocent inability to judge the various characters around her, not least her uncle. Her description of him makes her uncertainty clear: that enigmatical person martyr angel demon Uncle Silas with whom my fate was now so strangely linked, and whom I had begun to fear. This combination of menace in the present caused by some guilt carried over from the past is the mark of Irish gothic. Middle class Protestants in Ireland were finding their position increasingly uncertain. Members of Le Fanus own family were attacked during violent protests against the payment of tithes to the Church of Ireland in the 1830s and yet they still carried historical guilt, accentuated by the Famine. Gothic tales were a way of dealing with such double-edged anxieties. In a Glass Darkly, which was published the year before Le Fanus death in 1873, gathered five of his best tales, including Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story and an influence on Bram Stokers Dracula. At the end Laura, the heroine who has been terrorised by the vampiric Carmilla, is not quite able to reassure herself that her ordeal is absolutely over: It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door. 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