Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The nineteenth century saw Gothic fiction establish itself as a serious literary mode, one preoccupied with dread, the supernatural, and the darker registers of human experience. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, born in Dublin on 28 August 1814, was among the writers who worked most consistently within that tradition, producing novels, shorter fiction, and other forms across a career rooted in the intellectual and professional life of his era.
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Le Fanu held citizenship of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and worked in several capacities: as a lawyer, a jurist, a journalist, and a librettist, in addition to his writing. He composed in English and belonged firmly to the Gothic novel genre. The novel "Uncle Silas," published in 1864, was among his major works in long-form fiction. His 1872 collection "In a Glass Darkly" gathered a number of his narratives, including the novella "Carmilla," also published that year, and a work known under the alternate title "Countess Mircalla Karnstein."
"Carmilla" has been described as a foundational work of vampire literature, a designation that marks it as having contributed significantly to that strand of the Gothic tradition. Le Fanu died in Dublin on 7 February 1873, the year following the publication of both "In a Glass Darkly" and the novella that would come to carry that particular critical distinction.
Quotes by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me and hating me through death and after.
There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light. I cannot say we quarreled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone. What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation – to nothing.
D’Avray, her father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the child on his death-bed to me.
How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.
We are in God’s hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.” “Creator! Nature!“ said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature – don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so.
Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought.
Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,′ said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; ‘and people too; population shifts – there’s an old fellow, sir, they call Death.
The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance.
I am afraid we women are factionists; we always take a side, and nature has formed us for advocates rather than judges.
