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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814-1873), Irish journalist and author, was born of an old Huguenot family at Dublin on the 28th of August 1814. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1833. At an early age he had given proof of literary talent, and in 1837 he joined the staff of the Dublin University Magazine, of which he became later editor and proprietor. In 1837 he produced the Irish ballad Phaudhrig Croohore, which was shortly afterwards followed by a second, Shamus O'Brien, successfully recited in the United States by Samuel Lover. In 1839 he became proprietor of the Warder, a Dublin newspaper, and, after purchasing the Evening Packet and a large interest in the Dublin Evening Mail, he combined the three papers under the title the Evening Mail, a weekly reprint from which was issued as the Warder. After the death of his wife in 1858 he lived in retirement, and his best work was produced at this period of his life. He wrote some clever novels, of a sensational order, in which his vigorous imagination and his Irish love of the supernatural have full play. He died in Dublin on the 7th of February 1873. His best-known novels are The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas, a Tale of Bartram Haugh (1864). The Purcell Papers, Irish stories dating from his college days, were edited with a memoir of the author by A. P. Graves in 1880.