A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF: WRITINGS ON J. S. LE FANU, by Jim Rockhill. Swan River Press, Dublin, 2025.
Between 2002 and 2005, Ash-Tree Press released a three-volume set of stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, with introductory essays by Jim Rockhill. These can be ranked with the most important contributions to Le Fanu scholarship in our field since the Dover collections edited by the great E. F. Bleiler (BEST GHOST STORIES OF J. S. LEFANU, 1964; GHOST STORIES AND MYSTERIES, 1975), and the long essays on Le Fanu written by Jack Sullivan (ELEGANT NIGHTMARES, Ohio University Press, 1978 -- one of the best studies of horror fiction I've read).
Swan River Press has now collected revised and expanded versions of these Ash-Tree Press essays, along with supplementary articles, in a book essential for those with an interest in Le Fanu, in his place within the history of British ghost fiction, and in the aesthetics and techniques that he brought to the writing of horror stories.
Le Fanu remains a top figure in horror fiction, not only as a key influence on M. R. James and other British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but as a living example of innovation within our field. Like Ambrose Bierce in the United States, Le Fanu was a pioneer of modern horror fiction. He brought a new control of tone and pacing, a new brevity and sensory specificity to the craftsmanship of horror fiction that took it beyond the influence of Gothic romance. In this way, he resembled the writers who succeeded him far more than he resembled those writers, like Poe, who came before. He emphasized atmosphere and psychology above mere sensationalism, and introduced a new type of ghost that was neither an external intrusion nor a clear manifestation of internal states; instead, the ghosts of Le Fanu were inextricably entwined invaders from within and without. Were the ghosts real? Were they hallucinations? None of this mattered. What was important, instead, was how the ghost was perceived, and how this perception destroyed the minds of witnesses.
This modern approach, with its claustrophobically-subjective emphasis on personal perception and secret anxieties, would go on to be developed by M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, and others who preferred the strangeness of the unknown to the clearly-motivated and often moralistic ghosts of the past. Le Fanu showed the way. And yet, as Jim Rockhill writes:
"For all the honour bestowed upon him over the decades by such percipient scholar-creators of supernatural fiction as E. F. Benson, Elizabeth Bowen, Glen Cavaliero, Gary William Crawford, Dorothy L. Sayers, August Derleth, Henry James, M. R. James, Rosemary Pardoe, V. S. Pritchett, Montague Summers, and others, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is still given insufficient credit as a craftsman and often very little credit at all as a visionary in the field of spectral horror."
Part of the reason for this neglect in the early 20th Century was the unavailability of his books, especially in the United States. Le Fanu was ignored or dismissed by important surveyors of the field (like H. P. Lovecraft), because they could not find much of his work to read.
Recent decades have corrected this. Yet facts about the man's life have long remained elusive:
"Rumours concerning the man's life and death still run rampant. Many scholarly editions of his work still cannot even be bothered to provide the correct day of his death."
Jim Rockhill sets out to repair this:
"It has been the goal of this volume to provide a biographical context in which to help dispel any myths still distorting perceptions of the man, and offer commentary that might help liberate the works from those purely psychological interpretations and other limited critical pigeonholes into which they have been forced over the years. If any of this has caused the reader to linger and perhaps shudder a little longer over the terrors in Le Fanu's pages, we can count this project a success."
Jim Rockhill's book is indeed a success.
He begins with the unsettled political climate of Le Fanu's Ireland:
"Although [Le Fanu] has left no direct record of these events, it is difficult not to recognise it as one more factor contributing to the sense of instability, the visions of ancestral mansions tottering on their foundations, and the continual presence of something lying in wait just out of sight which haunt not only his ghost stories, but much of his other fiction as well."
A troubled life of political upheavals and family tragedies took its toll on Le Fanu:
"Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden, disaffected politically, saddled with debts and responsibilities related to his ventures in journalism, and attempting to raise four children on his own, Le Fanu retired to his home at 18 Merrion Square for the remaining sixteen years of his life. His thus virtually shutting himself off from society led Dublin to dub Le Fanu the 'Invisible Prince', an apt appellation considering the results of this isolation: a string of long, complex novels and a body of supernatural fiction remarkable in its atmosphere, intensity, and dark implication....
"By all accounts he was a fascinating if cryptic individual, but if the details of his external life are scarce during these years, the products of his imagination are prodigal."
Jim Rockhill goes on to consider these works in detail, with accounts of their often complicated publishing histories, and their often complex narratives.
"The characters in his folkloric tales tread along the convergence of three lines linking this world with the world of fairy tale and the world of nightmare. In the other tales, his characters are tied to reality by the same dull occupations and concerns that dog us to this day. These characters are soon made to feel the presence of another world, impinging upon and inexorably intruding into their own, a world capable of affecting not only the individual, but even the world around him."
Like the narrators of several Walter de la Mare stories, Le Fanu's victims often seem haunted not merely by ghosts, but by crowded alternate realities: nightmarish, destructive, and without consolation. If Le Fanu believed in heaven, he offered no hints of it, but he clearly believed in the "machineries of hell."
Jim Rockhill takes a close look at the influence of Swedenborg on Le Fanu's work, at conflicting accounts of his legendary death-by-nightmare, at stories once attributed to Le Fanu without strong evidence, and at stories that appeared in multiple versions as Le Fanu developed and expanded their ideas. In effect, A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF is a work of scholarship for scholars, a work of bibliography for bibliographers, a work of exploration for those who travel in the worlds of horror fiction, and, above all, a fine tribute to one of our field's greatest writers.
