Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu by Aoife Mary Dempsey

Reviewed by: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu by Aoife Mary Dempsey Meaghan Scott (bio) Aoife Mary Dempsey, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), pp. x + 224, $88 hardcover. In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey examines Le Fanu's legacy, providing fresh interpretations of his short stories and novels within their original publication contexts and setting his work in the context of historical, political, and biographical frameworks. Dempsey maintains that while previous "interpretations of Le Fanu's life and works have typically focused upon his religious affiliation or his proclivity for the supernatural," her book provides a critical revision of Le Fanu's writing within context—be it material, market, historical, or personal—"yield[ing] fresh [End Page 476] insight into a variegated writer, in many ways a writer unbound by any singular genre" (10). Since many of Le Fanu's works were initially published in the Dublin University Magazine (D.U.M.), Dempsey keeps the periodical at the forefront of her analyses of the fiction published within it. Dempsey begins with Le Fanu's short stories in the first chapter, "Material Culture, Serialisation and Lateral Reading: Le Fanu's Short Stories in Context," directing our attention to "The Watcher" (1847) and "The Fatal Bride" (1848) in particular. Dempsey acknowledges that while "'The Watcher' has received merited critical attention to date and indeed is one of Le Fanu's finest stories … it is rarely considered in its original publication format in the D.U.M. or alongside its companion piece, 'The Fatal Bride'" (45). Identifying "The Watcher" as one of the most well-known Le Fanu short stories, Dempsey contends, "'The Fatal Bride' is one of his least known, entirely out of print until a 2014 edition by Swan River Press that saw the two stories republished as a pair for the first time" (45). Insights such as this, stemming from her examination of Le Fanu's works within their original publication contexts, appear frequently throughout this book, each a precise and contextual analysis of Le Fanu's oeuvre. In the second chapter, "Immaterial Spaces: Le Fanu's Unhomely Houses," Dempsey transitions to Le Fanu's novels, such as The House by the Church-yard (1861–63). In focusing on the novels, she draws readers' attention to personal aspects of Le Fanu's life. As Dempsey says, "By the time he published 'An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House' in 1862, Le Fanu was widowed, orphaned and the new owner and editor of the Dublin University Magazine … as well as maintaining interests in several other Dublin newspapers" (70). Dempsey claims that Le Fanu's stylistic approach to his novels became more "domestically focused" in this period (70). Furthermore, "The theme of disruption to homelife and all that is familiar and safe can be linked to the pervasive socio-political disturbances that occurred in the years after the famine" (77). Dempsey closes this chapter with an analysis of Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72), alluding to the apparent strangeness of it among Le Fanu's works but contending that his "imagining of the vampire as a member of a dispossessed gentry, a homeless figure and a threat to the stable domestic life fits into the broader pattern of his work during the 1860s and into the 1870s at the confluence of shifting power dynamics and the threat of colonial insurrection" (107). Dempsey's multifaceted approach to (re)interpreting Le Fanu's works provides readers with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for this nineteenth-century author and the complexities surrounding and influencing his writing. The third and fourth chapters discuss aspects of Le Fanu's legacy via his authorial networking habits and the state of his manuscripts. In chapter [End Page 477] 3, "Fictional Networks: Le Fanu's Literary Legacy," Dempsey traces Le Fanu's "personal connections with well-known Victorian peers" and his "influence on some of the most prominent authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," such as Charlotte Brontë, Bram Stoker, and James Joyce (110). Le Fanu's connection with Charles Dickens is emphasized since Le Fanu wrote for Dickens's periodicals over an extended period of his career. But mapping Le Fanu's...

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