Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (/ˈlɛfən.juː/;[1][2] 28 August 1814 – 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction.

[4] Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the 1872 Gothic vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.

Sheridan Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot, Irish and English descent.

Within a year of his birth, his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, where his father, a Church of Ireland clergyman, was appointed to the chaplaincy of the establishment.

The following year the family moved back temporarily to Dublin, to Williamstown Avenue in the southern suburb of Blackrock,[8] where Thomas was to work on a Government commission.

In 1838 the government instituted a scheme of paying rectors a fixed sum, but in the interim, the Dean had little besides rent on some small properties he had inherited.

In 1833 Thomas had to borrow £100 from his cousin Captain Dobbins (who himself ended up in the debtors' prison a few years later) to visit his dying sister in Bath, who was also deeply in debt over her medical bills.

In 1847 Le Fanu supported John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in their campaign against the indifference of the government to the Irish Famine.

In 1856 the family moved from Warrington Place to the house of Susanna's parents at 18 Merrion Square (later number 70, the office of the Irish Arts Council).

After lukewarm reviews of the former novel, set in the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, Le Fanu signed a contract with Richard Bentley, his London publisher, which specified that future novels be stories "of an English subject and of modern times", a step Bentley thought necessary for Le Fanu to satisfy the English audience.

The demonic monkey in "Green Tea" could be a delusion of the story's protagonist, who is the only person to see it; in "The Familiar", Captain Barton's death seems to be supernatural but is not actually witnessed, and the ghostly owl may be a real bird.

[3] Though other writers have since chosen less subtle techniques, Le Fanu's finest tales, such as the vampire novella Carmilla and the short story "Schalken the Painter", remain some of the most powerful in the genre.

[12] They are mostly set in Ireland and include some classic stories of Gothic horror, with gloomy castles, supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, madness, and suicide.

Also apparent are nostalgia and sadness for the dispossessed Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, whose ruined castles stand as a mute witness to this history.

More disturbing, however, is the hero Spalatro's necrophiliac passion for an undead blood-drinking beauty, who seems to be a predecessor of Le Fanu's later female vampire Carmilla.

Like Carmilla, this undead femme fatale is not portrayed in an entirely negative way and attempts, but fails, to save the hero Spalatro from the eternal damnation that seems to be his destiny.

His best-known works, still widely read today, are:In addition to M. R. James, several other writers have expressed strong admiration for Le Fanu's fiction.

With Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers, Crawford has edited Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

Julian Moynahan's Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton University Press, 1995) includes a study of Le Fanu's mystery writing.