The Tiled House. J.S. Le Fanu

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

      Introduction by Michael Cox

      Ghost Stories of the Tiled House

      Schalken the Painter

       The Familiar

       The Murdered Cousin

       An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

       Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling

       Squire Toby’s Will

       Green Tea

       Madam Crowl’s Ghost

       Mr Justice Harbottle

       Footnotes

       Publication Details

       Select Bibliography

       Also in the Series

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      ‘Sheridan Le Fanu,’ wrote S.M. Ellis in 1916, ‘retains his own special place and fame as the Master of Horror and the Mysterious.’[1] Today, Le Fanu’s reputation is as high as ever amongst connoisseurs of supernatural fiction – a reflection not only of his historical importance in a literary genre that is gradually becoming critically respectable, but also of the enthusiastic endorsements bestowed on him by some of the most accomplished ghost fiction writers of the twentieth century. Amongst these, it was M.R. James who was largely responsible for Le Fanu’s rehabilitation after a long period of neglect and who first appreciated and described the peculiar blend of qualities that placed Le Fanu, in his opinion, ‘absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories … nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly’.[2]

      James’s own tales – among them some of the best ghost stories ever written in English – are similarly characterized by close attention to scene setting and circumstantial detail, to the evocation of a richly particularized actuality into which the supernatural insidiously intrudes itself. But James’s admiration for Le Fanu – which began as a boy and continued with no loss of pleasure to the end of his life – did not translate itself into mere imitation. Far from it. Le Fanu’s influence on James – and on those who, in turn, were influenced by James – was confined to generalities, not to specifics; to strategies and approaches, rather than to congruity of style. Nor did James ever claim too much for his predecessor, noting that Le Fanu had attained supremacy in one particular line: ‘he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer’ – better, for example, than Edgar Allen Poe, whose tales to James’s mind had ‘such an essential flavour of 1830–40 as takes the whole edge off them’.[3]

      The earliest tale in this present selection dates from just this period: ‘Schalken the Painter’, first published in the Dublin University Magazine (henceforth DUM) in May 1839; and it well illustrates James’s point. This, we feel, is good writing, not just good period writing. A good tale well told is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Le Fanu has held on to his readers. He was a born storyteller, acutely sensitive to the pace and dynamics of fictional narrative; above all, he had a genius for invoking exactly the right atmosphere for the kind of fiction in which he excelled. Take, as a random example, the opening of ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (Temple Bar, 1868):

      Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day, in their journey to the capital, about three miles south of the town of Applebury, and a mile and a half before you reach the Old Angel Inn, a large black-and-white house, as those old-fashioned cage-work habitations are termed, dilapidated and weather-stained, with broad lattice windows glimmering all over in the evening sun with little diamond panes, and thrown into relief by a dense background of ancient elms. A wide avenue, now overgrown like a churchyard with grass and weeds, and flanked by double rows of the same dark trees, old and gigantic, with here and there a gap in their solemn files, and sometimes a fallen tree lying across the avenue, leads up to the hall door.

      Yet Le Fanu was not, and did not regard himself as, a conscious artist – any more, interestingly, than M.R. James did. And though there is a distinct – if perplexing – metaphysical context to his stories, nor was Le Fanu self-consciously a philosopher or moralizer. In the best of his short tales – and supremely in his best known novel, Uncle Silas (1864) – he succeeded, as his most recent biographer observes, ‘through the synchronization of his own temperament with the inner logic of the material he chose’.[4]

      This is another way of saying that elements of Le Fanu’s personal life are reflected in his fiction, though transformed by imagination and introspection. But whereas in the case of M.R. James it is external reality that is drawn on to sustain the imaginative fabric, for Le Fanu it was a deeply troubled internal world that provided the impetus and sustaining