Laura is growing up in a castle with her retired English father when there is a carriage accident outside of their home. That unexpectedly brings a young girl named Carmilla into their lives, but all is not well. Carmilla makes unsettling romantic advances towards Laura. She is quite secretive and sleeps much of the day. What’s more, there is an uncanny resemblance between Carmilla and a family portrait of one of Laura’s ancestors, "Mircalla, Countess Karnstein".  Carmilla is part of the casebook of occult doctor Dr. Hesselius, and strongly influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. The novel has also inspired many films including The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Daughters of Darkness (1971).

Carmilla

Joseph Le Fanu

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Uncle Silas (1864) By Joseph S. Le Fanu Uncle Silas is a Victorian Gothic thriller, and an early locked-room mystery with a strong interest in the occult. The book grew out of an earlier short story, published as "The Murdered Cousin", in the 1851 collection Ghost Stories. The plot revolves around Maud Ruthyn, a young heroine tormented by governess Madame de la Rougierre. When Maud is orphaned, more trouble awaits when she is sent to live with her Uncle Silas.

Uncle Silas

Willing to Die

First I must tell you how I intend to relate my story Having never before undertaken to write a long narrative I have considered and laid down a few rules which I shall observe Some of these are unquestionably good others I daresay offend against the canons of composition but I adopt them because they will enable me to tell my story better than with my imperfect experience better rules possibly would In the first place I shall represent the people with whom I had to deal quite fairly I have met some bad people some indifferent and some who at this distance of time seem to me like angels in the unchanging light of heaven My narrative shall be arranged in the order of the events I shall not recapitulate or anticipate What I have learned from others and did not witness that which I narrate in part from the hints of living witnesses and in part conjecturally I shall record in the historic third person and I shall write it down with as much confidence and particularity as if I had actually seen it in that respect imitating I believe all great historians modern and ancient But the scenes in which I have been an actor that which my eyes have seen and my ears heard I will relate accordingly If I can be clear and true my clumsiness and irregularity I hope will be forgiven me

Willing To Die

In a Glass Darkly

"[...]   The faint glow of the west, the pomp of the then lonely woods of Richmond, were before us, behind and about us the darkening room, and on the stony face or the sufferer—for the character of his face, though still gentle and sweet, was changed—rested that dim, odd glow which seems to descend and produce, where it touches, lights, sudden though faint, which are lost, almost without gradation, in darkness. The silence, too, was utter; not a distant wheel, or bark, or whistle from without; and within the depressing stillness of an invalid bachelor's house.   I guessed well the nature, though not even vaguely the particulars of the revelations I was about to receive, from that fixed face of suffering that so oddly flushed stood out, like a portrait of Schalken's, before its background of darkness.   "It began," he said, "on the 15th of October, three years and eleven weeks ago, and two days—I keep very accurate count, for every day is[...]".

In A Glass Darkly

"Carmilla" is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. First published in 1872, it tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla. "Carmilla" predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years and has been adapted many times for cinema.  Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to publications@publicdomain.org.uk This book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via DMCA@publicdomain.org.uk

Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to publications@publicdomain.org.ukThis book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via DMCA@publicdomain.org.uk

Green Tea

The Wyvern Mystery

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as ”absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories”. Three of his best-known works are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard. In addition to M. R. James, several other writers have expressed strong admiration for Le Fanu’s fiction. E. F. Benson stated that Le Fanu’s stories ”Green Tea”, ”The Familiar”, and ”Mr. Justice Harbottle” ”are instinct with an awfulness which custom cannot stale, and this quality is due, as in The Turn of the Screw, to Le Fanu’s admirably artistic methods in setting and narration”. Benson added, ” best work is of the first rank, while as a ‘flesh-creeper’ he is unrivalled. No one else has so sure a touch in mixing the mysterious atmosphere in which horror darkly breeds”. Jack Sullivan has asserted that Le Fanu is ”one of the most important and innovative figures in the development of the ghost story” and that Le Fanu’s work has had ”an incredible influence on the genre; regarded by M. R. James, E. F. Bleiler, and others as the most skillful writer of supernatural fiction in English.”

Wyvern Mystery

Uncle Silas is a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is notable as an early example of the locked room mystery subgenre. It is not a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic. Like many of Le Fanu’s novels, it grew out of an earlier short story, ”A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” (1839), which he also published as ”The Murdered Cousin” in the 1851 collection Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery. The setting of the original story was Irish; presumably it was changed to Derbyshire for the novel because this would appeal more to a British audience. It was first serialized in the Dublin University Magazine in 1864, under the title Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas, and appeared in December of the same year as a triple-decker novel from the London publisher Richard Bentley. The novel is a first person narrative told from the point of view of the teenaged Maud Ruthyn, an heiress living with her sombre, reclusive father Austyn Ruthyn in their mansion at Knowl. She gradually becomes aware of the existence of Silas Ruthyn, a black sheep uncle whom she has never met, who was once an infamous rake and gambler but is now apparently a fervently reformed Christian. Silas’s past holds a dark mystery, which she gradually learns from her father and from her worldly, cheerful cousin Lady Monica: the suspicious suicide of a man to whom Silas owed an enormous gambling debt, which took place within a locked, apparently impenetrable room in Silas’s mansion at Bartram-Haugh.

Sheridan Le Fanu was born at No. 45 Lower Dominick Steet, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot origins. Both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights. His niece Rhoda Broughton would become a very successful novelist. Within a year of his birth his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in Phoenix Park, where his father, an Anglican clergyman, was the chaplain of the establishment. Phoenix Park and the adjacent village and parish church of Chapelizod were to feature in Le Fanu's later stories. Le Fanu studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, where he was elected Auditor of the College Historical Society. He was called to the bar in 1839, but he never practised and soon abandoned law for journalism. In 1838 he began contributing stories to the Dublin University Magazine, including his first ghost story, entitled "A Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter" (1839). He became owner of several newspapers from 1840, including the Dublin Evening Mail and the Warder. In 1844 Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett, the daughter of a leading Dublin barrister. In 1847 he supported John Mitchell and Thomas Meagher in their campaign against the indifference of the Government to the Irish Famine. His support cost him the nomination as Tory MP for County Carlow in 1852. His personal life also became difficult at this time, as his wife Susanna suffered from increasing neurotic symptoms. She died in 1858 in unclear circumstances, and anguished excerpts from Le Fanu's diaries suggest that he felt guilt as well as loss. However, it was only after her death that, becoming something of a recluse, he devoted himself full time to writing. In 1861 he became the editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine and he began exploiting double exposure: serializing in the Dublin University Magazine and then revising for the English market. The House by the Churchyard and Wylder's Hand were both published in this way. After the lukewarm reviews of the former novel, set in the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, Le Fanu signed a contract with Richard Bentley, his London publisher, which specified that future novels be stories "of an English subject and of modern times", a step Bentley thought necessary in order for Le Fanu to satisfy the English audience. Le Fanu succeeded in this aim in 1864, with the publication of Uncle Silas, which he set in Derbyshire. In his very last short stories, however, Le Fanu returned to Irish folklore as an inspiration and encouraged his friend Patrick Kennedy to contribute folklore to the D.U.M. Le Fanu died in his native Dublin on February 7, 1873. Today there is a road in Ballyfermot, near his childhood home in south-west Dublin, named after him.

Evil Guest

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Joseph Le Fanu. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Joseph Le Fanu

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Joseph Le Fanu. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Carmilla

Uncle Silas

Willing To Die

In A Glass Darkly

Carmilla

Green Tea

Wyvern Mystery

Uncle Silas

Evil Guest