Joseph Sheridan LeFanu was born on a day like today 1814 en Dublin. He began writing horror stories a year after finishing his studies at Trinity College, although he devoted himself to the journalism, that he was able to combine with literature. It is considered the father of the so-called ghost stories. He also published 14 novels and his tale of vampires, Carmilla, is your title best known. This is a review of his work.
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu
His father, who was a clergyman of Huguenot descent, sent him to the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin to study law. But Le Fanu never practiced as a lawyer and was dedicated to journalism. It was author of many poems, ballads and short stories that he published in the Dublin University Magazine, of which he ended up being the director and owner.
When his wife died In 1858, Le Fanu retired from social life to become a writer of nocturnal customs and passionate about the occult, so much so that he was known as The Invisible Prince. It is considered one of the great masters of supernatural terror from the Victorian era.
Carmilla
It was first published in the magazine Dark Blue in 1871. and marks the turning point in the creation of the female vampire in universal literature. It is the most most famous work by Le Fanu and one of those considered masters of the gothic horror genre. With a fascinating protagonist, It also stands out for its action and the great construction of both the other characters and the technology dark, always between the mist of day and night. It's a precedent of Draculaby Bram Stoker, which would not appear until almost thirty years later.
You do not know how much I love you, nor can you imagine greater confidence. But I am bound by a few votes; no nun has made them half as terrible. And I still don't dare to tell my story, not even to you. The time is coming when you will have to know everything. You will think me cruel and very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more passionate, the more selfish. You don't know how jealous I am. You must come with me, and love me, to death or hate me, but stay with me, and hate me through death and after it. There is no word indifference in my apathetic nature.
The Archives of Dr. Hesselius
This is a volume that brings together four of the five stories that Le Fanu wrote about the doctor who is an expert in occult phenomena, Martin Hesselius, a preceding character also from Bram Stoker's Van Helsing or Algernon Blackwood's John Silence.
Includes: Green Tea, in the form of an epistolary story where Dr. Hesselius will investigate the case of diabolical visions that lead Reverend Jennings to suicide; The familiar, another of his most successful stories; Judge Harbottle, about the strange happenings in a haunted house in Westminster; and the aforementioned Carmilla.
Cloostedd's Prophecy
It tells the story of a ancient rivalry between two families from a small town in England, Golden Friars, and from a terrible revenge. Sir Bale Mardykes, a greedy baronet, blames his young secretary Phillip feltram of the disappearance of a bank note. Sadly, Phillip flees the house in the middle of a big storm and is soon after found in a nearby lake.
Uncle Silas
Another of those works, in the form of a macabre mystery novel, in which the mastery in the treatment and gradation of the horror that he possessed is demonstrated Le Fanu. Thus, with a nostalgic first tone At the beginning of the narrative about the childhood memories of a lady, it ends by leading the reader to a dead end in which a terrifying murder.
The house next to the cemetery
Set in the eighteenth century, in an Irish village called Chapelizod, with a social life full of intrigues, murky relationships and strange events, this novel tells what happens when accidentally unearthed a skull with obvious signs of violence like a hole.