Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

[GOLLUM]

The 1800s irish horror author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu came to my notice recently and I was wondering if anyone here has read anything by this person. Apparently his vampire novella Carmilla was an influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Any insights would be welcome.

[knivesout]

I've read lots of his ghost stories in anthologies - very cool classic horror fare. Pal Ravenus will have more to say on this topic!

[GOLLUM]

Thanks for the rapid response.

I look forward to Ravenus's input....

[ravenus]

Ever get the sense that people give you far more credit than due?

Anyway I've mainly read the Le Fanu collection Through a Glass Darkly, which I highly recommend since it contains a lot of stories I enjoyed including Green Tea, Carmilla, Schalken the Painter...actually it's been a long time and I have a sieve-like memory so I can't be sure of how exactly Carmilla influences Dracula save that it is a predated Vampire story in English litt.

But anyway classic horror fans shouldn't be without this collection, on that I swear , and I personally prefer Le Fanu to M.R. James, as I think he generally delivers a better payoff.

[GOLLUM]

HMMM..Le Fanu better than MR James, looks like I'm going to want to investigate this author...

Thanks for your assistance Ravenus and stop being so modest...

[ravenus]

Oops...Le Fanu's collection is called In a Glass Darkly
Through a Glass Darkly was a film made by Ingmar Bergman, who very likely had some kind of homage in mind since his film is also a horror film of the pyschological type.

[ravenus]

Free e-texts of Le Fanu's stories can be found here if you want to try before you buy:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/l

[Rosemary]

Originally Posted by ravenus

Oops...Le Fanu's collection is called In a Glass Darkly
Through a Glass Darkly was a film made by Ingmar Bergman, who very likely had some kind of homage in mind since his film is also a horror film of the pyschological type.

I read Le Fanu when I was going through my 'reading horror' stage...
His style of writing was very good I thought.

[Teresa Edgerton]

I've read a number of his short stories, as I have a habit of picking up anthologies of Victorian ghost stories. I forgot that "Carmilla" was one of his (comes of the aforementioned anthology habit, I suppose, as stories and authors get mixed up). I believe that the main influence on Stoker (and others since) was that "Carmilla" made vampires sexy for the first time, rather than being the rotting revenant of somebody's vile old woodcutter grandfather, as in most of the folk tales. Although in this case, the vampire's allure was based on understated but unmistakable lesbian sex (yes, in the nineteenth century!).

One of my favorite of his stories (or at least one of the few that I clearly remember being his) is "A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family," which in spite of the ponderous title is a neat little gothic thriller, which looks like something that may well have influenced Charlotte Bronte.

They dramatized his novel Uncle Silas a while back. I saw it on Masterpiece Theater so I suspect it came from the BBC. Peter O'Toole was the uncle in question, as I recall, and Jane Lapotiere (whose name I have almost certainly misspelled) was the fair heroine's rather bizarre governess, and much scenery was chewed by both of them. Anyway, I adored it, and would love to see it again.

"Green Tea" is quite good, although modern readers would be rather surprised by the main premise. I also liked "Schalken the Painter."

Poking around the internet to see what else of his I've read, some of the titles look familiar but not enough to spark off memories of the actual stories.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by ravenus

Free e-texts of Le Fanu's stories can be found here if you want to try before you buy:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/l

Thanks Ravenus, I'll have a look at some of those stories you mention. I notice they have a version of Carmilla, so I'll be interested to see what relationship this has to the Dracula tale.

[ravenus]

Originally Posted by Kelpie

..."Carmilla" made vampires sexy for the first time, rather than being the rotting revenant of somebody's vile old woodcutter grandfather, as in most of the folk tales.

Ha, you seem to have in mind the story Wurdulak by Tolstoy, which was loosely adapted by Mario Bava as one of the episodes in his anthology Black Sabbath.

...a neat little gothic thriller, which looks like something that may well have influenced Charlotte Bronte.

Charlotte Bronte of Jane (yaawwwnnnn) Eyre fame wrote gothic thrillers? Or have you confused her with sister Emily who wrote the brilliant Wuthering Heights?

[Teresa Edgerton]

You don't call a book with a mad first wife hidden in the attic a gothic thriller? In my youth, there was a whole genre of these written for female readers, and they were all modeled after Jane Eyre. It was in that sense that I used the term.

But I can assure you that Charlotte Bronte's contemporaries did not regard
Jane Eyre as a boring book. If you read some of the reviews that were published at the time, you'd think the story was near pornographic.

Of course -- bringing the conversation back on topic -- Le Fanu, being a man, was able to write about a lot of things that would have been unacceptable coming from the Bronte sisters.