Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Ghost Stories
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814 into a middle-class Irish family of Huguenot descent (his great-uncle was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan). He was mainly educated at home and then at Trinity College, Dublin. Afterwards he was called to the bar: however, he never practiced law. Le Fanu was a prolific contributor to the Dublin University Magazine, and the horror-mystery story is what made him famous.
In 1858, Le Fanu's beloved wife Susanna died, and although he continued to write, he maintained a reclusive lifestyle. He purchased the Dublin University Magazine in 1861 and changed its direction from a purely student publication to an international one. He died in Dublin in 1873.
Le Fanu was a popular writer in Victorian times, but he became temporarily forgotten due to critics' snobbery of the writing genre he excelled in. His stories became revived in popularity in the 1920s due to the interested of ghost story collector M.R. James, and they are now recognized as classics of the genre.
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