Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of horror stories, mysteries and Gothic tales and has been hailed as one of the earliest writers of ghost stories, a genre that enjoyed enormous popularity during the Victorian era. Born into a family with strong literary roots (a number of his relatives were writers, including his great-uncle, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan), Le Fanu was also drawn to writing early in his life, but his father was a strict, Calvinist preacher and looked down upon such pursuits. While his family struggled through a series of financial hardships, Le Fanu wound up studying law at Trinity College Dublin, but abandoned this calling to become a journalist. He eventually would come to own several newspapers - including the Dublin Evening Mail - and began submitting short ghost stories to the Dublin University Magazine. After his wife died of a mysterious mental illness, Le Fanu gave up writing fiction until his mother passed away in 1861. But following her death, Le Fanu began producing works at a furious rate, completing ten novels in as many years, along with numerous short stories and novellas, which he collected and published in several volumes. Sheridan Le Fanu died of a heart attack in 1873 at the age of fifty-eight. But his works lived on to inspire an entire generation of horror and ghost fiction writers, including Henry James ("The Turn of the Screw"), Oliver Onions ("Widdershins") and Bram Stoker ("Dracula").