The Le Fanus were of Huguenot descent: one of them – Charlés de Cresserons, a name Le Fanu was to use as a literary pseudonym – had fought for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. By the eighteenth century they had become established as solid, respectable members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. But there was also a more volatile, literary and histrionic strain in the family, for Le Fanu’s grandmother on his father’s side was a sister of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan: these opposite qualities are apparent in Le Fanu, in whom predictability and enigma, conservatism and erratic brilliance, mingled.
In July 1811 Thomas Le Fanu, a curate of Dr William Dobbin, rector of Finglas on the outskirts of Dublin, married Dr Dobbin’s daughter Emma. Thomas Le Fanu and his bride began their married life at 45 Lower Dominick Street in Dublin, where their first child, Catherine, was born in 1813. The following year, in August 1814, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in the same house, though his earliest memories were of the Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, to where the family had moved in 1815 when Thomas Le Fanu was appointed Chaplain. Phoenix Park was then a place of pastoral seclusion dotted with picturesque villages such as Chapelizod: both the Park and, especially, Chapelizod took early hold of Le Fanu’s imagination and both reappear in his novels and stories.
In 1826 the family moved to Abington in Co. Limerick, Thomas Le Fanu having been appointed rector there, in addition to holding the deanship of Emly. In the rector’s library, besides conventional fare, there were books with a natural appeal to the future author of ghost stories and mysteries, such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and The Mummy: a Tale of the Twenty-second Century. Beyond the civilized confines of the glebe house and its library discontent and violence among the native Catholic population also fed into the imagination of the young Le Fanu, producing a lasting image of the Great House under siege and isolated, threatened by violent intrusions from an anarchic outer world. In W.J. McCormack’s words: ‘The essence of society as Le Fanu grew to know it in his Abington years was the isolation of his people from “the people”.’ In spite of the antagonism of the Irish to the political and religious allegiances of his class, Le Fanu nurtured strong nationalistic sympathies, as well as a deep admiration for the Irish people. He also derived imaginative sustenance from Irish folklore and legends, imbued as the majority were with a deep supernaturalism. How potent was the effect of these Limerick years, in particular the landscape of his boyhood and adolescence, can be seen for instance in this passage from the late story ‘The Child that went with the Fairies’ (1870) describing the haunted hill of Lisnavoura in the Slievefelim mountains:
A deserted country. A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully … It was at the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura close in front of the solitary little cabin over the undulating slopes and sides of Slievefelim.
In 1832 Le Fanu went up to Trinity College, Dublin, to read classics and train for the law. His first story appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in January 1838: ‘The Ghost and the Bonesetter’, the first tale in the collection posthumously entitled The Purcell Papers, named after the eponymous narrator, Father Francis Purcell. It was not long before writing began to assume a greater importance in Le Fanu’s life than his legal studies. ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (reprinted here) was published in the DUM in May 1839 (the year Le Fanu was called to the Irish Bar) and is the first of Le Fanu’s stories to hint at a synchronicity of the external themes of his fiction and personal disorientation. ‘Schalken’, a story of supernatural rape, is a variation on the demon lover theme, and though a certain ambiguity is conveyed by linking the climax of the story with Schalken’s dream, the whole thrust of the narrative is towards accepting the reality of supernatural intrusions. The death of his much-loved sister Catherine in March 1841 brought Le Fanu himself face to face with death for the first time, and from this date he began to show signs of morbidity and melancholy, coupled with the kind of religious and sexual anxiety reflected in ‘Spalatro’ (DUM, March 1843).
In December of that year Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett,[5] daughter of George Bennett, QC, a leading barrister on the Munster circuit, who lived at 18 Merrion Square South in Dublin. Le Fanu took his bride back to Abington for Christmas, writing to his sister-in-law Elizabeth: ‘I think I never saw my father and mother take such a fancy to my dear little wife … She is as merry as a lark, & for my part I am ten thousand times more in love with her than ever.’[6] Their first child, Eleanor, was born in February 1845, followed by another daughter, Emma, a year later and a son, christened Thomas Philip, in September 1847.
Le Fanu’s first novel was The Cock and Anchor, a costume romance of eighteenth-century Dublin and written in the popular style of W.H. Ainsworth and G.W.M. Reynolds. Another historical novel, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (illustrated by ‘Phiz’), followed in 1847, though historical romance was soon abandoned by Le Fanu for journalism and short tales.
In the New Year of 1851 Le Fanu published his first collection of stories, the now rare volume Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, containing ‘The Watcher’ (later reprinted as ‘The Familiar’ in In a Glass Darkly), ‘The Murdered Cousin’ (an early form of what was to become Uncle Silas), ‘Schalken the Painter’, and ‘The Evil Guest’ (an early short form of A Lost Name). At the same time, in January 1851, the DUM carried three ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’: ‘The Village Bully’, ‘The Sexton’s Adventure’, and ‘The Spectre Lovers’ – all anticipations of The House by the Churchyard.
The Le Fanus’ fourth child, George Brinsley Le Fanu, was born in August 1854. By this time the family had moved into the Bennetts’ house in Merrion Square, George Bennett, his wife and unmarried daughters having taken up residence in Sodylt Hall, Shropshire, in July 1850. ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in the DUM in December 1853, was Le Fanu’s last piece of fiction for nine years – a reflection of increasing domestic tension generated by debts, Susanna’s ill health, family deaths, and, in 1855, his brother William’s religious conversion, which threw into relief his own and Susanna’s spiritual doubts. The death of her father in May 1856 had a devastating effect on Susanna, who was already tormented by religious uncertainty and whose mental stability was threatened by a near hysterical reaction to death. As Le Fanu recorded: ‘If she took leave of anyone who was dear to her she was always overpowered with an agonizing frustration that she would never see them again. If anyone she loved was ill, though not dangerously, she despaired of their recovery.’[7]
On 26 April 1858 Susanna herself was taken seriously ill. She died two days later. Le Fanu wrote immediately to his mother:
The greatest misfortune of my life has overtaken me. My darling wife is gone … Pray to God to help me. My light is gone … She was wiser than I & better & would have been to the children what no father could be … She was the light of my life & light in every day.[8]
Nelson Browne called the Le Fanus’ marriage ‘an exceptionally happy one’. It was not quite that. If Le Fanu was – as his brother William said – ‘devotedly attached’ to Susanna, there was also much anxiety, torment even, and negativity in the relationship. Of the extent of Susanna’s neurosis Le Fanu himself left a record:
She one night thought she saw the curtains of her bed at the side next the door drawn, & the darling old man [her father], dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her … [he said] ‘There is room in the vault for you, my little Sue.’
After his wife’s death Le Fanu became progressively more withdrawn and painful introspection became habitual. But in spite of these apparent disabilities he continued to write and in 1861 purchased the Dublin University Magazine,