Kim Newman 

Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic spirit lives on

Kim Newman: A timely Google doodle reminds us that, two centuries after his birth, the writer's sophisticated variations on vampire and ghost stories retain their eerie power
  
  

Vampyr
Head of a tradition … still from Carl Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr, inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu. Photograph: Tavin/ Everett / Rex Features Photograph: Tavin/ Everett / Rex Features

The latest Google doodle – a wispy, fanged blonde girl-head floating over a sleeping dark-haired woman – commemorates the 200th birthday of the Irish novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73). The image honours his most famous story, Carmilla, first published in 1871 in a magazine called The Dark Blue, then incorporated a year later into the important collection In a Glass Darkly.

The novella is notable for tackling a vampire theme decades before Le Fanu's countryman Bram Stoker wrote Dracula (which contains several deliberate echoes of Carmilla) and presenting an eroticised view of predatory female friendship which earns it a place on the list of early (if veiled) depictions of same-sex relationships in literature.

It's also a still-readable tale of creeping dread as a sickly house guest drains the life out of the daughter of a family she has been palmed off on. The novella inspired a run of films, from Carl Dreyer's arty Vampyr (1931) and Roger Vadim's suggestive Et mourir de plaisir (Blood and Roses, 1960) to Roy Ward Baker's lusty The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Vicente Aranda's surreal La Novia Ensangrentada (The Blood-Spattered Bride, 1972). If Stoker is responsible for the lasting image of the vampire as cloaked, hypnotic mastermind, then Le Fanu's Carmilla is the archetype of the provocative vixens who appear in Dracula in the form of the Count's three wives and manifest in Hammer Films as terrifying, pearly-fanged starlets in low-cut shrouds. The Vampire Lovers, a Hammer production, casts Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla, a more voluptuous and obvious temptress than the invalid cuckoo-in-the-nest character of the story. The Vampire Lovers even yielded sequels, Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971), making Le Fanu the creator of a minor, but persistent horror franchise.

A great-nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Le Fanu was the son of a Protestant churchman. He studied law at Trinity, but neglected the bar in favour of journalism and fiction. From 1844 to 1858, he was married to Susanna Bennett, who suffered from mental disorders that must have influenced Le Fanu's depiction of extreme neuroses. He was among the first practitioners of the psychological ghost story, in which the haunting might be the result of supernatural intrusion into the everyday world but could also arise from the broken psyche of a protagonist.

In a Glass Darkly is purportedly a collection of case histories written up by Dr Martin Hesselius, a proto-psychiatrist who is among the first occult detectives in literature. The pompous (and not always effectual) Dr Hesselius tries to present the supernatural in semi-scientific terms, which paradoxically invite the reader to consider stranger explanations. In Green Tea, an English clergyman claims to be persecuted by a monkey no one else can see, which Hesselius believes is a spirit from a parallel plane that the patient can discern because of his addiction to sacrilegiously milk-free tea.

Le Fanu, unlike Hesselius, is fully aware of the ridiculous side of the story, which nevertheless builds from fussy, slightly absurd detail to a frightening, unsettling climax. Mr Justice Harbottle also deals with a protagonist plagued by phantasms which might arise from his own mind, and additionally touches on social issues unusual in 19th-century ghost stories. A judge known for harsh and unjust sentences dreams he is put on trial by a doppelgänger who condemns him to the gallows – is he manifesting repressed guilt, or beset by a supernatural avenger?

That Le Fanu's ghost stories are better known than his other work is down to a later master, MR James, who edited and introduced Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, published in 1923, collecting much of Le Fanu's weird fiction, but oddly omitting the particularly disturbing Schalcken the Painter. Later editors compiling collections of ghost or horror tales have tended to go to In a Glass Darkly or Madam Crowl's Ghost for their selections.

Le Fanu also wrote thrillers (Wylder's Hand, 1864, The Wyvern Mystery, 1869) and historical novels in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, such as The House By the Churchyard (1863). His besseller was Uncle Silas, a conscious attempt to revive a mode of gothic popular in earlier generations. Published in 1864, it plays nostalgic variations on the themes of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë as an innocent heroine is imperilled in the old dark house of her charismatic reprobate guardian, an uncle with designs on her inheritance. Uncle Silas has also often been adapted, as a Gainsborough melodrama starring Jean Simmons in 1947 and a BBC serial entitled The Dark Angel, with Peter O'Toole, in 1987.

Along with Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu was among the first to practise self-aware gothic, drawing on the conventions of blood and thunder melodrama but subtly letting the reader know he's having fun with the game. At the climax of Uncle Silas, the excessively innocent Maud Ruthyn may deliberately arrange for one of her persecutors to be horribly killed, prompting the reader to wonder if she – or anything in this world – is as simple as it seems.

 

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