Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Novels & Novellas: Uncle Silas The Cock and Anchor The House by the Church-Yard Wylder's Hand Guy Deverell The Tenants of Malory Haunted Lives The Wyvern Mystery Checkmate Willing to Die The Haunted Baronet Spalatro Short Story Collections: In a Glass Darkly: Green Tea The Familiar Mr Justice Harbottle The Room in the Dragon Volant Carmilla The Purcell Papers: The Ghost and the Bone-Setter The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh The Last Heir of Castle Connor The Drunkard's Dream Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess The Bridal of Carrigvarah Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter Scraps of Hibernian Ballads Jim Sulivan's Adventures in the Great Snow A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family An Adventure of Hardress Fitzgerald The Quare Gander Billy Maloney's Taste of Love and Glory Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery: Madam Crowl's Ghost Squire Toby's Will Dickon the Devil The Child That Went with the Fairies The White Cat of Drumgunniol An Account of Some Strange Distrubances in Aungier Street Ghost Stories of Chapelizod Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling Sir Dominick's Bargain Ultor de Lacy The Vision of Tom Chuff Stories of Lough Guir Other Tales: The Evil Guest The Watcher Laura Silver Bell The Murdered Cousin The Mysterious Lodger An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House The Dead Sexton A Debt of Honor Devereux's Dream Catherine's Quest Haunted Pichon and Sons The Phantom Fourth The Spirit's Whisper Dr. Feversham's Story The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts What Was It? Poetry Biography Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was a leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era.

It was late in the autumn, and I was skimming along, through a rich English county, in a postchaise, among tall hedgerows gilded, like all the landscape, with the slanting beams of sunset. The road makes a long and easy descent into the little town of Gylingden, and down this we were going at an exhilarating pace, and the jingle of the vehicle sounded like sledge-bells in my ears, and its swaying and jerking were pleasant and life-like. I fancy I was in one of those moods which, under similar circumstances, I sometimes experience still—a semi-narcotic excitement, silent but delightful. An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here and there, and plenty of old English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest. The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end. These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows—my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.

Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect, but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats, and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s. Through painterly imagery, biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names, Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats's Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomises the problems of identity, bequeathed by Yeats. Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history, Dissolute characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture, modernism and politics.