Essays in Books
Achilles, Jochen. "Monkey Business in Intercultural and Intertextual Perspective: Species and
Ethnos-Orientation in Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue," Le Fanu's 'Green Tea,' and Spofford's
'Circumstance.'" Animal Magic: Essays on Animals in the American Imagination. Ed. Jopi Nyman and
Carol Smith. Joensuu, Finland: Faculty of Humanities, University of Joensuu, 2004.
Allen, Nicholas. "Sheridan Le Fanu and the Spectral Empire." The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to
the Twentieth Century. Ed. Helen Conrad O'Brien and Julie Anne Stevens. Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2010.
Very much a Marxist reading of Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly that certainly makes a kind of sense
because many of Le Fanu's works center on money and power and the ghosts are of a sort of
monetary value. Allen writes, "The question of value is central in Le Fanu to questions of haunting,
retribution, and regret. . . . Ireland's changing role within the economy of empire informs Le Fanu's
imagination."
Andriano, Joseph. "'Our Dual Existence': Archetypes of Love and Death in Le Fanu's 'Carmilla.'"
Contours of the Fantastic. Ed. Michele K. Langford. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
A revised version of this essay forms the section on Andriano's later book (see above).
Anon. "Review of The Purcell Papers by J. Sheridan Le Fanu." A Hideous Bit of Morbidity: An Anthology
of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I. Ed. Jason Colavito. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2008.
Reprints an excerpt of a review of The Purcell Papers from The Saturday Review.
Auerbach, Nina. "My Vampire, My Friend: The Intimacy Dracula Destroyed." Blood Read: The
Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Studies Le Fanu's "Camilla" and the film versions by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Roy Ward Baker, and
Gabrielle Beaumont, noting that the friendship and love between Carmilla and her victim shows that
Le Fanu's vampire was overshadowed by Stoker's male vampire. Regards Gabrielle Beaumont's
television film as the most faithful to the motives behind Le Fanu's vampire.
Bigelow, Gordon. "Inside Out: Value and Display in Thomas de Quincey and Isaac Butt." Victorian
Literature and Finance. Ed. Francis O'Gorman. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Discusses a story by Isaac Butt, a contemporary of Le Fanu, noting that its use of symbolism and
metaphor are similar to Le Fanu's use of Swedenborgianism.
Bon, Margarita. "Seen Through Her Eyes: Point of View in Uncle Silas." That Other World: The
Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Is Contexts. 2 vols. Ed. Bruce Stewart. Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998.
A study of the narration and point of view in the novel, noting that so many of Maud's perceptions
are couched in terms of the supernatural. However, the conclusion of the narrative supports the
male patriarchal society in which Maud lives.
Brock, Marilyn. "The Vamp and the Good English Mother: Female Roles in Le Fanu's Carmilla and
Bram Stoker's Dracula." From Wollstonecraft to Stoker: Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction.
Ed. Marilyn Brock. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
"The female victims in Carmilla and Dracula appear to be most vulnerable when they have reached
menarche, which makes them suitable vessels for sexual reverse-colonization. The fear of reverse-
colonization and its relationship to late Victorian domestic ideology is demonstrated in Dracula and
Carmilla when foreign, sexually aggressive Others serve as threats to British patriarchal potency and
the future of the English race is jeopardized."
Brown, Carolyn. "Figuring the Vampire: Death, Desire, and the Image." The Eight Technologies of
Otherness. Ed. Sue Golding. London: Routledge, 1997.
Brings into play the small painting of the vampire Carmilla that her victim Laura finds and discusses
the "effigy" in its discussion of the vampire. Quotes the famous passage, "Girls are caterpillars when
they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes."
Brugger, Eveline. "Where Do the Cullens Fit In? Vampires in European, Folklore, Science and
Fiction." Twilight and History. Ed. Nancy R. Reagin. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010.
"Carmilla" is considered as a European vampire classic.
Cahill, Ann. "Irish Folktales and Supernatural Literature: Patrick Kennedy and Sheridan Le Fanu."
That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts. 2 vols. Ed. Bruce
Stewart. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998.
Compares and contrasts the stories by Le Fanu and Kennedy based on Irish folktales, and concludes
that Le Fanu's stories are more terrifying, thus reflecting his cultural Protestant Anglo-Irish
insecurities as opposed to Kennedy's more positive Catholicism.
Casey, Ellen Miller. "'Highly Flavoured Dishes' and 'Highly Seasoned Garbage': Sensation in The
Athenaeum." Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Kimberley Harrison and Richard
Fantina. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
Comments on the fact that Le Fanu's fictions, notably The Wyvern Mystery and Guy Deverell, were
regarded by contemporary critics as Sensational texts and frequently appeared in generic reviews
along with books by Braddon, Reade and Collins.
Cerrullo, John J. "Swedenborgianism in the Works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Desocialization and
the Victorian Ghost Story." Swedenborg and His Influence. Ed. Erland J. Brock. Bryn Athyn, PA:
Academy of the New Church, 1988.
A fairly useful, brief study that regards Le Fanu's use of Swedenborg is to emphasize evil, as in the
case of "Green Tea." Argues that Le Fanu could not embrace the positive aspects of Swedenborg; he
chose the dark side. For this reason, Cerrullo does not consider Le Fanu a convert. Sees Le Fanu's
protagonists as "cut off", "people who are as profoundly alone as anyone in Victorian fiction." He
remarks that they are in a "desocialized" state. He says, "The overwhelming impression carried away
from a reading of Le Fanu's novels is that of a world in which the orderly patterns of human
interaction, the established and predictable network of bonded relationships, is progressively
dismantled."
Chernaik, Warren. "Mean Streets and English Gardens." The Art of Detective Fiction. Ed. Warren
Chernaik, Martin Swales, and Robert Vilain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Mentions Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins as classic masters of crime fiction.
Cooper, David. "Stanford and Le Fanu's Shamus O'Brien: Protestant Constructions of Irish
Nationalism in Late Victorian England." Art and Ideology in European Opera. Ed. Rachel Cowgill,
David Cooper and Clive Brown. Woodbridge, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2010.
An interesting study of Charles Villiers Sranford's opera based on Le Fanu's poem "Shamus O'Brien"
that provides charts showing the parallels and differences between the opera and the poem. Notes
that Le Fanu was astonished at how popular his poem was.
Cox, Michael. "Introduction." Casting the Runes, and Other Ghost Stories. By M. R. James. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Debenham, Helen. "The Victorian Sensation Novel." A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. William
Baker and Kenneth Womack. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Relates Le Fanu's sensationalism to the mainstream of this popular Victorian genre, noting his
"veering respectively towards the Gothic and the high-society romance."
DeCuir, Andre L. "Homosexuality and the Closet Threshold in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Green
Tea.'" Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth Century England. Ed. Jay Losey and William D. Brewer.
New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.
" . . . when elements of 'Green Tea' are examined closely and then placed in relief by a reading of
'Carmilla,' along with its more frank portrayal of homosexual desire, the acknowledgement of a male
homosexual identity in Victorian fiction edges closer to the threshold."
Dirda, Michael. "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu." Classics for Pleasure. New York: Harcourt, 2007.
An essay on Le Fanu's Uncle Silas that discusses descriptive detail that slides off into horror and
death. Le Fanu, when writing objective narrative, never really escapes from the use of the Gothic and
ghostly.
Dirda, Michael. "The October Country." Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000.
Le Fanu, Robert Aickman, and other ghost story writers are discussed briefly in this piece.
Doerksen, Teri Ann. "Deadly Kisses: Vampirism, Colonialism, and the Gendering of Horror." The
Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night. Ed. James Craig Holte. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2002.
Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla" "provide markers against which to map out the links
between Victorian portrayals of illicit sexuality through the metaphor of the vampire and other
period representations of darkness, Otherness, and the exotic as they connect to representations of
gender and sexuality."
Dupeyron-Lafay, Francoise. "Limaginaire fantastique des XVIII et XIX siecles." Forets Fantastique. Ed.
Lambert Barthelemy. Revue Otrant (Art et Litterature fantastique) Nos. 27-28. Paris: editions Kime, 4
trimestre, 2010.
Dupeyron-Lafay, Francoise. "Les passages dans In a Glass Darkly de J.S. Le Fanu." Une Litterature de
l'inquietude. Paris: l'Harmattan & Aix-Marseille, Universite de Provence, No. 8 Annales du Monde
anglophone), 1998.
Dyer, Richard. "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexualty, Homosexuality as Vampirism."
Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction. Ed. Susannah Radstone. London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1988.
Le Fanu's "Carmilla" is mentioned early in the essay, but on the whole an excellent and well-
researched essay on homosexuality and vampirism, citing a number of obscure nineteenth and early
twentieth century works. Of value in interpreting Le Fanu's female vampire.
Freeman, Nick. "The Victorian Ghost Story." The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Ed.
Andrew Smith and William Hughes. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
"Le Fanu's story ['Schalken the Painter'] disdained the providential and refused to explain itself,
offering an unsettling fusion of fact and fiction. Through sparing use of horrific description and
granting considerable leeway to readers, it was to prove extremely influential on the ghost story's
development."
Gagnier, Nancy. "The Authentic Dracula: Bram Stoker's Hold on Vampiric Genres." Goth: Undead
Subculture. Ed. Lauren, M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Compares and contrasts Le Fanu's "Carmilla" with Polidori's "The Vampyre" and Stoker's Dracula.
Regards Le Fanu's vampire as different in its slow, homosexual seduction of its victim.
Garcia-Bermejo Giner, M Fuencisla. "Morphosyntactical Variation in XIXth C. Derbyshire." Fif tn:
Actes del XV Congreso de AEDEAN Association Espanola de Estudios Anglonorteamericanos, Logrono, 16-18
de diciembre de 1991. Ed. Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez and Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime. La
Rioja: Colegio Univ. de La Rioja, 1993.
Garcia-Bermejo Giner, M. F. "Personal Pronouns in Derbyshire as Reflected in Sheridan Le Fanu's
Uncle Silas." Studia Patriciae Shaw Oblata, III. Ed. S.G. Fernandez-Corugedo, Mariea Suarez Socorro
and Juan E. Tazon. Oviedo: Univ. de Oviedo, 1991.
Gaylin, Ann. "Ghostly Dispossessions: The Gothic Properties of Uncle Silas." Troubled Legacies:
Narrative and Inheritance. Ed. Allan Hepburn. University of Toronto Press, 2007.
A study of Maud Ruthyn's persecution and attempted murder as a kind of physical violation of
Maud. Studies the underlying sexual theme of the novel and relates it to the greed for money by
Maud's Uncle Silas and his son, Maud's cousin, in which monetary value is placed on her body.
Geary, Robert F. "Carmilla and the Gothic Legacy: Victorian Transformations of Supernatural
Horror." The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature. Ed. Leonard Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999.
Le Fanu's "Carmilla" "stands as a paradigm of the transformation of the incoherent numinous
elements of the faded Gothic into the enduring form of the modern supernatural short story."
Geary, Robert F "The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-Side of Nature and the Victorian
Supernatural Tale." Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Joe Sanders. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Studies Catherine Crowe's famous essay The Night-Side of Nature and shows its place in the
transformation of the Gothic novel into the Victorian supernatural tale. Notes the mingling of science
and the supernatural and studies Le Fanu's "Green Tea" in this connection.
Gibbons, Luke. "The Mirror and the Vamp: Reflections on the Act of Union." In Hearts and Minds:
Irish Culture and Society under the Act of Union. Ed. Bruce Stewart. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2002.
Regards Le Fanu's Carmilla's blood lust and love as a metaphor for the Anglo-Irish hold on the
country. "Conquest, as we have seen, may be all the more thorough under the guise of civility and
consent, and it is this fusion of the language of sympathy with that of terror and sensationalism
which marks the entry of the vampire onto the political stage."
Girard, Gaid. "'It Was My Privelege to be Your Friend' de 'Carmailla' a Dracula." Dracula, Stoker,
Coppola, Ellipses. Ed. Giles Menegaldo and D. Sipierer. Paris, 2005.
Girard, Gaid. "La Bohemienne et la Vampire, Le Fanu et Stoker: sur les Ailes du Temps." Dracula,
Mythe et Metamorphoses. Ed. Claude Fierobe. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005.
Girard, Gaid. "Shades of the Fantastic in The Dublin University Magazine." The Book in Ireland Ed. J.
Genet, S. Mikowski, and F. Garcier. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.
An excellent and detailed study of the fantastic tales (by Le Fanu and others) in the magazine. Notes
the frequent essays on German literature of the fantastic. Studies briefly Henry Ferris's essays
written under several pseudonyms, the most significant, Irys Herfner. Le Fanu is discussed
throughout.
Girard, Gaid. "Sheridan Le Fanu: Le Docteur Hesselius, Faux Detective." Les Detectives de L'etrange.
Ed. Lauric Guillaud and Jean-Pierre Picot. Colloque de Cerisy, Le Manuscrit, 2007.
Girard, Gaid. "Traduction: 'L'Enfant qui Disparut avec les Fees' de J.S. Le Fanu." L'Irlande
Fantastique. Rennes: Terre de Brume, 2002.
Guijarro, Maria Jose Feu. "The Semantics of the Supernatural in Le Fanu's 'Carmilla': A Functional
Lexematic Analysis of the Story of a Female Vampire." Proceedings of the 20th International AEDEAN
Conference. Ed. P. Guardio and J. Stone. Barcelona, Spain: Universitat de Barcelona, 1997.
Haslam, Richard. “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Fantastic Semantics of Ghost-Colonial Ireland.”
That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts. 2 vols. Ed. Bruce
Stewart. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998. I, 268-86.
Argues that Le Fanu's "Green Tea" reflects many aspects of Le Fanu's experience--political, religious,
and personal--and that the story is not an allegory, but a prism though which Le Fanu's anxieties are
filtered. The story reflects as in a mirror Le Fanu's world.
Heller, Tamar. "The Vampire in the House: Hysteria, Female Sexuality, and Female Knowledge in
Le Famu's 'Carmilla.'" The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction.
Eds. Barbara Herman and Susan Mayer. New York: Garland, 1996.
Perceptive study that draws from Freudian and other studies of hysteria to show that the men in the
narrator Laura's life try to suppress female knowledge of sexuality. Ultimately, they destroy the
vampire Carmilla, who displays hysterical symptoms, to prevent her victim Laura from becoming
hysterical too.
Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. "Teaching Irish Gothic: Big-House Displacements in Maturin and Le Fanu."
Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction. Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller. New York: Modern
Language Association, 2003.
Hennelly discusses the methods he presents in teaching the Anglo-Irish Gothic, emphasizing the
architectural metaphors of "the big house" as Gothic castle. Notes the architectural descriptions in Le
Fanu of the houses of Knowl and Bartram-Haugh as mirror images of each other, one reflecting life
(Knowl) and one reflecting death (Bartram-Haugh). In this sense, the big houses of the Anglo-Irish
are metaphors for the anxiety of their insular, unstable position in nineteenth century Ireland. Raises,
though, the question as to whether there really is an Anglo-Irish Gothic and poses this question in the
courses he teaches.
Hughes, William. "Victorian Medicine and the Gothic." The Victorian Gothic. Ed. Andrew Smith and
William Hughes. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Studies In a Glass Darkly as both a secular and spiritual work. Noting the irony of the tale that
appears to reduce it to the effects of green tea or dyspepsia, which causes would have been well-
accepted, but ironically is a sickness of the soul.
James, M.R. "J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)." Horror: 100 Best Books. Ed. Stephen Jones and
Kim Newman. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988.
Reprints M.R James's introductory essay on Le Fanu's most famous novel.
Johnson, George M. "Algernon Blackwood's Modernist Experiments in Psychical Detection." Formal
Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag,
2007.
Discusses Le Fanu's Dr. Martin Hesselius in Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly but merely regards the doctor
as a precursor of Algernon Blackwood's psychic-doctor-detective. Unaware of the irony in Le Fanu
shown in recent criticism of Le Fanu's metaphysical doctor.
Jones, Ann Maria. "Sheridan Le Fanu." A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert and
M.A. Malden. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2011.
Explores Le Fanu's contribution to the Sensation traditions of the 1860s, as exemplified by the work
of Collins, Braddon, Reade, and Wood.
Kegler, Adelheid. "Elements of Swedenborgian Thought in Symbolist Landscapes: with Reference to
Sheridan Le Fanu and George Mc Donald." Between Method and Madness: Essays on Swedenborg and
Literature. Ed. Stephen McNeilly. London: Swedenborg Society, 2005.
A study of the "mental landscape" in Le Fanu and relates it to Symbolism and the symbolic writings
of Emanuel Swedcenborg. Studies "Mr. Justice Harbottle" and says, one can see here that it is
Swedenborgian theosophy which gives to the metaphysical concern of Symbolism in the late 19th
century its images and concepts. In Le Fanu's story of Mr. Justice Harbottle, it is the image of Hell."
Kilfeather, Siobhan. "The Gothic Novel." The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson
Foster. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Studies the Irish Gothic novel in its many varieties. Notes that dismemberment is a recurring motif
in the Irish Gothic and this is also found in Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard where a skull is
found in a grave.
King, Stephanie. "Violence as Patrimony in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas." From Wollstonecraft to Stoker:
Essays on Gothic and Victorian Sensation Fiction. Ed. Marilyn Brock. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
" . . . just as fallen woman narratives allow for destitute mothers to produce doomed daughter, so too
do fallen men narratives place a negative value on inherited deviance. Uncle Silas disavows the
traditional inheritance of title, as it demonstrates the more disturbing patrimony of deviance,
violence, and doom."
Kirk, Russell. "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale." In The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays.
Ed. George A. Panichas. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007.
The "'invisible Prince,' Le Fanu--archetype of the literary men of this genre, is believed to have died
literally of fright. He knew that his creations were not his inventions merely, but glimpses of the
abyss."
Kitson, Peter J. "The Victorian Gothic." A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. William Baker and
Kenneth Womack. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
A good survey of the Victorian Gothic that discuses Uncle Silas and "Carmilla." Notes that Le Fanu's
novel is akin to works by Wilkie Collins and Dickens. Regards "Carmilla" as the pinnacle of the
Victorian Gothic, with its emphasis on the erotic nature of Carmilla's relationship with her victim,
Laura.
Khotinskaia, A.I. "Transformatsiia goticheskogo zhanra romance v romane Dzh. Sh. Le Faniu 'Diadia
Sailis.'" Mir romantizma, tom 10 (34). Ed. I.V. Kartashova, E.G. Miliugina. Tver, Russia: Tverskil
gosudarstvennyl universitat, 2004.
Kreilkamp, Vera. "Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel." Ireland and the British Empire. Ed. Kevin
Kenny. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Discusses the use of fiction and history in writers like Butt and Lover, and notes that Le Fanu blends
fact and the supernatural in a comparable manner.
Kreilkamp, Vera. "The Novel of the Big House." The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John
Wilson Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Discusses Uncle Silas in the context of the Irish "big house." Notes, as have many critics, that the
novel is Irish and has been transformed into an English setting. Sees the duality of Austin Ruthyn
and Silas Ruthyn as persecutors of Maud. This persecution is expressed as the disintegration of the
Anglo-Irish big house. Mentions the sensational legend of Le Fanu's death as a metaphor for the
persecution of the Angro-Irish and the disintegration of their foothold in Ireland. Le Fanu is
mentioned briefly at several places in this collection of essays.
Lafuente, Alberto Lazaro. "Spanish Readings of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla.'" In the Wake of the Tiger: Irish
Studies in the Twenty First Century. Ed. David Clark and Ruben Jarazo Alvarez. Oleiros: Netbiblio,
2010.
Reads "Carmilla" in relation to "Franco's Regime . . . a period in which a strict censorship determined
what was morally or politically correct" (83). Notes how the lesbian theme was largely overlooked
by censors of the book and film versions arising from it. A fair essay, but its accuracy is undermined
by the opening line, which identifies Le Fanu as "John" rather than "Joseph."
Lee, Hyun-Jung. "'One For Ever' Desire, Subjectivity and the Threat of the Abject in Sheridan Le
Fanu's Carmilla." Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Peter Day. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006.
Drawing impetus from Freud's essay "The Uncanny" and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, studies the simultaneous breakdown of the self and the merging of selves into one in Le
Fanu's novella. Relates this element to a subversion of the notion of the whole self in Victorian
society.
Lehtinen, Katri. "Twentieth Century Vampire Literature: Intimations of Evil and Power." This Thing
of Darkness: Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. Ed. Richard Paul Hamilton and Margaret
Sonser Breen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
Le Fanu's "Carmilla" provides background for the essay.
Loe, Thomas. "The Strange Modernism of Le Fanu's 'Green Tea.'" That Other World: The Supernatural
and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts. 2 vols. Ed. Bruce Stewart. Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1998.
Studies "Green Tea" in terms those elements that presage modernism. Le Fanu's audience
"encouraged him to experiment with new narrative tactics, or at least to combine new tactics with
well established features to generate a new 'spin' or slant for his narratives. My thesis is that often
these tactics anticipate those usually associated with the innovations of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century modernist writers."
Longford, Christine. "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1814-1873." Of One Company: Biographical Studies of
Famous Trinity Men. Ed. D.A. Webb. Dublin: Icarus, Trinity College, 1951.
A wonderful piece by Lady Longford, a genuine Le Fanu enthusiast, who bases much of what she
says on the work of S.M. Ellis and M.R. James. However, she concludes her essay with this: "And I
am looking forward to the publication of a full-length biography of Le Fanu by Miss Florence Millar,
who has made a detailed study of his letters and family papers and a wealth of unpublished
material." As of this date, the work has never appeared.
Lozes, Jean. "Le Fanu's Houses." The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Representation. Ed. Jacqueline
Genet. Savage: Barnes and Noble, 1991.
Le Fanu's "strange fear of desire and fear about owning a home reveals the impossibility of any real
assimilation proper to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy from which Le Fanu was descended. The double
and divided loyalty to England and to Ireland was an unavoidable penalty for this class which
experienced an inexorable decline in the nineteenth century. In this painful context, the Big House,
symbol of an authority which was more and more questionable, played a major role in Le Fanu's
fiction and in his own life. Le Fanu's houses, fantastic expressions of a homesickness and discomfort
related both to the past and to the present, appear as highly paradoxical places in which the
occupants are almost strangers to themselves, constantly threatened by the unknown, madness and
death." Persists in mentioning the sensational legend of Le Fanu's death.
Lucendo, Santiago. "Return Ticket to Transylvania: Relations between Historical Reality and
Vampire Fiction." Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture. Ed.
John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
Mentions Le Fanu's setting of "Carmilla" in Styria and notes that initially Stoker was going to set
Dracula's home in Styria.
Lynch, Eve M. "Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant." The Victorian
Supernatural. Ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Notes that male writers of the ghost story, such as Le Fanu, in Victorian England were in the
minority. The Victorian ghost story was a feminine phenomenon.
Major, Adrienne Antrim. "Other Love: Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' as Lesbian Gothic." Horrifying Sex: Essays
on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
A good study that springs from the work on the lesbian vampire by Terry Castle and Paulina
Palmer. Notes that Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' presents a character is is transgressive and subversive at
once. The male patriarchal characters find Le Fanu's vampire Carmilla as threatening because she is
a self-accepting homosexual who subverts all that the male characters believe about sexuality.
Manlove, C.N. "Swift and Fantasy." More Real than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts.
Ed. Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha. Westport, CT: Greeneood Press, 1991.
Manlove ignores the irony and complexity of Le Fanu's "Green Tea" when he reduces the Rev. Mr.
Jennings experiences simply to the drinking of too much green tea.
Manlove, Colin. "Introduction to Modern Fantasy." Fantastic Literature. Ed. David Sandner.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
Manlove's introduction this 1975 study notes that Le Fanu aims for a frisson in his reader and this is
the primary aim of the ghost story. Notes that M.R. James utilizes this technique.
Mariconda, Steven J. "'As Time Goes on I see a Shadow Coming' M.R. James's Grammar of Terror."
Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James. Ed. S.T. Joshi and Rosemary Pardoe. New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2007.
Compares M.R. James use of words with Le Fanu's and shows that even though James regarded Le
Fanu as his master, his use of words are divergent. In Le Fanu, there is a predominant use of the past
tense. Whereas in James, the present tense is used more often. Argues that this difference in James is
later taken up by such writers as Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, In the many essays in this
volume, Le Fanu is mentioned at many places throughout.
Marigny, Jean. "Dialectique de l'Echange dans les Histoires de Vampires." Societe des Anglicistes de l"
Enseignement Supereieur: Echanges Actes du Congres de Strasbourg. Foreword G. Laprevotte. Paris:
Didier, 1982.
Marsh, Joss Lutz. "In a Glass Darkly: Photography, the Premodern and Victorian Horror." Prehistories
of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush.
Stanford University Press, 1995.
Begins as a study of Le Fanu's "Carmilla," but moves into a study of Dracula, H.G. Wells's The Time
Machine and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Discusses the hideous black woman in
the damaged carriage in which Carmilla and her mother are carried, to a study of the primitivism
giving way to science in the Victorian era, which was transformed by the motion picture medium
into a new art of primitivism.
McAteer, Michael. "A Troubled Union: Representations of Eastern Europe in Nineteenth-Century
Irish Protestant Literature." Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film
and Culture. Ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Sees "Carmilla" as an analogue of the decline of the Protestant upper class in Ireland. The character
Laura appears to move in a world where even money gradually seems to have no value.
McCormack, W.J. "Sheridan Le Fanu and Greater Chapelizod." The Shadow of James Joyce: Chapelizod
and Environs. Ed. Motoko Fujita. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2011.
"The Chapeliod fictions, beginning with The Cock and Anchor, including the short pieces of 1851, and
culminating in The House, investigate several portionalities of Irish sectarian conflict, but also reach
out to the larger political opposition (variously measured) between Ireland and England or Britain."
McNally, Raymond T. "Bram Stoker and Irish Gothic." The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of
the Night. Ed. James Craig Holte. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Like other Anglo-Irish fantasists, such as Bram Stoker and Charles Robert Maturin, Le Fanu, in his
"Carmilla," expresses the anxiety of the insular Anglo-Irish class.
Mentxaka, Aintzane Legarreta. "Recognition: Two Anglo-Irish Texts Building on Lesbian Literary
Tradition." Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland. Ed.
Borbala Farago and Moynagh Sullivan. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.
Compares and contrasts Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and Kate O'Brien's As Music and Splendour to show "that
they both consciously build on a lesbian literary tradition--and that the reader is expected to
recognize a connection to other lesbian texts. This connection underscores the lesbian content of the
stories, and, conversely, it invites the reader not just to re-visit earlier texts, but to re-cognize them, to
think about them anew."
Miess, Julie. "Another 'Gendered Other'?: The Female Monster-Hero." Horrifying Sex: Essays on
Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.
Focuses on the play by Elfrie de Jelinek, Disease, or Modern Women, which names its protagonist
Carmilla, after Le Fanu. Basically a feminist theme, liberates the vampire from being a monster, but,
rather, as a source of female liberation from the male hierarchy.
Mighall, Robert. "'A Pestilence which Walketh in Darkness': Diagnosing the Victorian Vampire."
Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography. Ed. Glennis Byron and David Punter. Houndsmills,
Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Press, 1999.
Studies Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla" as tales of onanism and shows that many quack
medical studies of masturbation often described such practices as vampirism.
Milbank, Alison. "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Gothic Grotesque and the Huguenot Inheritance." A
Companion to Irish Literature. Ed. Julia M. Wright. 2 vols. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Vol. 1.
Taking her cue from Victor Sage and James Walton, sees Le Fanu as a thorough "nihilist," whose
Huguenot inheritance enabled him to use Gothic props to work out his bleak outlook through the
Grotesque of the Gothic. Le Fanu's inferiority as a Huguenot Anglo-Irish Protestant placed him in a
unique position to give his characters a fantastic cast against a background of darkness.
Milbank, Alison. "'Powers Old and New': Stoker's Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic." Bram Stoker:
History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. Ed. William Hughes. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998.
Studies the Anglo-Irish precursors of Stoker, Charles Maturin and Le Fanu. "Between them, they
represent a strongly supernatural development of the Enlightenment Gothic of Ann Radcliffe
combined with the Romantic diabolism of Matthew Lewis." Ultimately, the Anglo-Irish Gothic
expresses the neurotic, insular world of the Anglo-Irish.
Milbank, Alison. "The Victorian Gothic in English Novels and Stories, 1830-1880." Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Relates Stoker to the Anglo-Irish Le Fanu and Charles Maturin and points out Stoker's similar use of
Anglo-Irish concerns. Notes that Stoker is not often considered an Anglo-Irish author.
Miserendino, Maria Cristina. "'The Familiar' di Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu." Studi irlandesi. Ed. Carlo
Bigazzi. Latina, Italy: Yorick libri, 2004.
Moynahan, Julian. "The Politics of Anglo-Irish Gothic: Maturin, Le Fanu and 'The Return of the
Repressed.'" Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature. Ed. Heinz Kosok. Bonn: Bouvier, 1982.
Later expanded for Moynahan's later book (see above), discusses the fact that in Le Fanu's fiction
"there is a significant interplay, sometimes a willed confusion between the idea of possession, by
apparent ghosts or demons, and the idea of dispossession, as in the loss of property, power, status."
This is an analogue of the condition of the insular Anglo-Irish, who were losing there social and
economic position in Ireland.
Nalecz-Wojtcak, Jolanta. "Facing Evil: The Motif of Temptation in Some Ghost and Vampire Stories."
Studies in Literature and Culture in Honor of Professor Irena Janicka-Swiderska. Ed. Maria Edelson. Lodz:
Lodz University Press, 2002.
Nally, Clare. "'Protestant Suspicions of Catholic Duplicity': Religious and Racial Constructs in Le
Fanu and Yeats." No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature. Ed. Paddy Lyons and
Alison O'Malley-Younger. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009.
Excellent section on "Green Tea" and the significance of the monkey, which is said to have "overtly
colonial dimensions" while also providing a commentary (also mentioned in Tracy's introduction to
In a Glass Darkly) on the troubled and discriminatory relationship between Irish Catholics and
Protestants: " . . . the demonic monkey suggests the underbelly of Gaelic Irishness: stereotypically
violent, irrational, bestial, and uncontrollable. It is an image which haunts the Anglo-Irish
ascendancy."
Palmer, Paulina. "The Lesbian Vampire: Transgressive Sexuality." Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual
Difference in Gothic Literature. Ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
Reiterates much of what Palmer says in her book Lesbian Gothic. See General Studies above.
Pedlar, Valerie. "Dracula: a Fin-de-Siecle Fantasy." The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities. Ed.
Dennis Walder. London: Routledge, 2001.
An excellent essay on Dracula, comparing it to Le Fanu's "Carmilla." Parallel passages show the
influence of Le Fanu on Stoker. Extends into discussions of Freud and his followers and the
psychoanalytic readings of the works.
Pykett, Lyn. "Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel." The Cambridge Companion to the
Victorian Novel. Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
"Le Fanu is an important figure in the history of the Victorian ghost story and tale of the
szupernatural, contributing a wide range of novels and stories about the occult and hallucinatory
spiritual possession." Discusses Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, "Green Tea," and "Carmilla" and places them in
the context of the Victorian sensation novel and the ghost story. Le Fanu is regarded as a pivotal
figure in the genres in the nineteenth century.
Roger, Alain. "Dracula et Carmilla." Dracula: de la mort a la vie. Ed. Charles Grivel. Paris: Editions de
l'Herne, 1997.
Ruthner, Clemens. "Vampirism as Political Theory: Voltaire to Alffed Rosenberg and Elfiede
Jelinek." Visions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fifteenth International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. Ed. Allienne R. Becker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Draws on philosophical, historical, political and medical works about vampirism to show that the
literary vampire expresses political ideas of their day. Studies Stoker and brings into play Le Fanu's
"Carmilla." Notes that in Elfriede Jelinek's twentieth century play Disease or Modern Women, the name
Carmilla is drawn from Le Fanu's famous vampire novella.
Sadleir, Michael. "Rhoda Broughton." In his Things Past. London: Constable, 1944.
The essay on Broughton provides much information about her relationship with her uncle, Le Fanu.
Letters by Le Fanu to publisher Richard Bentley concerning Broughton are provided.
Sage, Victor. "Censorship and the Codes of the Picturesqiue: The Druidic, The Cyclopean and the
Cultural Other in Le Fanu's Later Fiction." Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files. Ed.
Andrew Smith, Diane Mason, and William Hughes. Bath, England: Sulis Press, 2002.
Discusses Le Fanu's responding to his publisher Richard Bentley's insistence that Le Fanu write
stories in English settings and in modern times. Le Fanu's use of landscape reflects his rejection of
his native Ireland. Thus, he censors himself and creates a tension between himself and the Other,
specifically the Irish country in which he was born. In embracing Britain, he rejects Ireland, and this
neurotic dualism is expressed in tales of corrupt families and ghosts and vampires.
Sage, Victor. "Irish Gothic: C. R. Maturin and J. S. Le Fanu." A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David
Punter. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
In Maturin and Le Fanu "There is something, perhaps, about the Huguenot refugee heritage which
gives these writers, perched with varying degrees of discomfort inside a dominant class, a particular
sensitivity to the darker implications of a fractured society."
Sage, Victor. "Resurrecting the Regency: Horror and Eighteenth-Century Comedy in Le Fanu's
Fiction." Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000.
Comic allusions to past Anglo-Irish comedy show that Le Fanu exercises a form of "cultural
memory, in which the nightmares of the past are explicitly, but subtly, revived, often revealing the
bankrupt heriage of an aristocracy that has lost its capacity to resist its own history and is willing the
prey upon its own young in order to retain power. Notes incidents in Uncle Silas and The Rose and the
Key that illustrate the point.
Sanders, Joe. "'My God, no! The Varieties of Christian Horror Fiction." Contours of the Fantastic. Ed.
Michele K. Langford. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Notes the ambiguity of Le Fanu's "The Mysterious Lodger" by saying " . . . Le Fanu's story may be a
deliberate success at disconcerting and disturbing readers. Despite the narrator's conquest of his
disbelief, we are left in unresolved doubt, hanging somewhere between the certainty of Christianity
and the uncertainty of horror."
Sandoe, James. "Dagger of the Mind." The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed.
Howard Haycraft. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1976.
Remarks that Le Fanu's mystery and horror stories "are only rarely satisfying. And this, I think, is
because they are wordy. Le Fanu is usually laboring meticulously toward a discovery we have
made for ourselves." Says that some of Le Fanu's short ghost stories that "seem perennially capable
of shocking us."
Sayers, Dorothy L. "Gaudy Night." The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed.
Howard Haycraft. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1976.
Sayers mentions Le Fanu in her novel Gaudy Night, and this essay comments on that novel. She says
"that if the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began in the hands of
Collins and Le Fanu, and become once more a novelk of manners instead of a pure crossword
puzzle."
Sayers, Dorothy L. "The Omnibus of Crime." The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New edition with index. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1976.
Reprints this essay that introduced Sayers's famous anthology The Omnibus of Crime. Sayers
remarks that "he has the gist of investing the most mechanical of plots with an atmosphere of almost
unbearable horror."
Schirmer, Gregory A. "Tales from the Big House and Cabin: The Nineteenth Century." The Irish Short
Story: A Critical History. Ed. James F. Kilroy. New York: Twayne, 1984.
"In expressing the sense of guilt and insecurity that haunted his own class, Le Fanu created stories
that ultimately transcend not just the Gothic tradition to which they owe so much, but also the Anglo-
Irish sensibility that lies behind them." Studies "Mr. Justice Harbottle," "The Familiar," and
"Carmilla" as analogues for the Anglo-Irish guilt.
Setecka, Agnieszka. "'The Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth': Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle
Silas and John Banville's The Book of Evidence: Two Narratives of Crime." Ironies of Art/Tragedies of Life:
Essays on Irish Literature. Ed. Liliana Silkorska. Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005.
A comparison and contrast study of Le Fanu's novel with John Banville's post-modern novel The Book
of Evidence. Regards the irony in both novels and shows how Banville's novel may be seen as a
parody of the sensation novels like Uncle Silas. Discusses the narrative techniques in the works and
show how the reader is incorporated into the irony of the novels.
Stewart, Bruce. "James Joyce." The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster.
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Comments on Joyce's use of Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard in Finnegans Wake.
Stewart, Bruce, ed. That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Its
Context. Colin Smythe, 1998.
This book contains pieces about Le Fanu, see above.
Thomas, Ardel. "Queer Victorian Gothic. The Victorian Gothic. Eds. Andrew Smith and William
Hughes. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Studies Le Fanu's "Carmilla" as a study in aberrant sexuality as well as tender love story. Remarks
that the story pre-dates and foreshadows Richard von Krafft-Ebbing's study Psychopathia Sexualis.
Thomas, Tammis Elise. "Masquerade Liberties and Female Power in Le Fanu's Carmilla." The
Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature. Eds. Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas. New
York: Scarecrow Press, 1999.
Relates the masquerade scenes in "Carmilla" to literary representations of the masquerade in the
eighteenth century to show that "Le Fanu depicts the masquerade as a site of initiation into the
terrors of the supernatural and the forbidden pleasures of female same-sex desire."
Tilley, Elizabeth. "Charting Culture in the Dublin University Magazine." Ireland in the Nineteenth
Century: Regional Identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
Le Fanu is noted for encouraging the publication of articles on the supernatural in the magazine. " . .
. by Le Fanu's time in the 1860s, that position . . . is questioned through the increased number of
gothic stories and general articles on the occult and the supernatural whose inherent anti-
Catholicism, questioning of science, and blurring of the boundary between self and other opens up a
new chapter in the continuing story of Irish Protestant paranoia."
Welter, Nancy. "Women Alone: Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' and Rosetti's Goblin Market." Victorian
Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Kimberley Harrison and Richard Fantina. Columbus,
OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Willis, Chris. "A House for the Dead: Victorian Mausolea and Graveyard Gothic." Victorian Gothic.
Ed. Karen Sayer and Rosemary Mitchell. Leeds, England: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 2003.
Mentions Le Fanu's "The Room in the Dragon Volant" as example of burial-alive narratives in
Victorian fiction.
Willis, Martin. "Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', Ireland, and Diseased Vision." Literature and Science (Essays and
Studies Vol. 61). Ed. Sharon Ruston. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008.
A fresh view of the novella that considers "the story as an important articulation of the intersection of
Victorian disease theories with Anglo-Irish ethnicity that reveals how entwined were science and
politics in the Victorian cultural imagination."
Wisker, Gina. "Devouring Desires: Lesbian Gothic Horror." Queering the Gothic. Ed. William
Hughes and Andrew Smith. Manchester University Press, 2009.
Briefly discusses Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and the Hammer Films based on it. "The advances of the
lesbian vampire represent dangerous sexual deviance, a challenge to patriarchal controls.
Contemporary feminist critics and those influenced by queer theory, however, might find in Carmilla
a literary role model of the excitement and potential of transgression, questioning patriarchal power
relations and conventional identity constructions."
Zuber, Devin P. "Swedenborg and the Disintegration of Language in Sheridan Le Fanu's Sensation
Fiction." Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard
Fantina. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
A complex and excellent study of the Swedenborgian elements in Le Fanu's work that takes it a step
beyond the work of W.J. McCormack and Jim Rockhill. Argues that there is a breakdown of
language in Le Fanu's works that make them strikingly modern. He concludes, "Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu is thus not only important for understanding the permutation of the gothic from the Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) to the sophisticated ambiguities of Turn of the Screw (1898), but his work continues to
strike many readers as perculiarly modern. This resonation depends on the ways in which Le Fanu
was able to adapt Swedenborg's ideas to the framework of sensation fiction and beyond."