This volume collects four ghostly tales by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: "The Mysterious Lodgers," "Madam Crowl's Ghost," "Dickon the Devil," and "Sir Dominick's Bargain."

Uncle Silas, subtitled "A Tale of Bartram-Haugh," is a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of sensation fiction by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike. It is an early example of the locked room mystery subgenre, rather than a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic. Like many...

PASSAGE IN THE SECRET HISTORY OF AN IRISH COUNTESS. Being a Fifth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh. The following paper is written in a female hand, and was no doubt communicated to my much-regretted friend by the lady whose early history it serves to illustrate, the Countess D--. She is no more-she long since died, a childless and a widowed wife, and, as her letter sadly predicts, none survive to whom the publication of this narrative can prove 'injurious, or even painful.' Strange two powerful and wealthy families, that in which she was born, and...

A noble Huguenot family, owning considerable property in Normandy, the Le Fanus of Caen, were, upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, deprived of their ancestral estates of Mandeville, Sequeville, and Cresseron; but, owing to their possessing influential relatives at the court of Louis the Fourteenth, were allowed to quit their country for England, unmolested, with their personal property. We meet with John Le Fanu de Sequeville and Charles Le Fanu de Cresseron, as cavalry officers in William the Third's army; Charles being so distinguished a member of the King's staff that he was...

JIM SULIVAN'S ADVENTURES IN THE GREAT SNOW. Being a Ninth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh. Jim Sulivan was a dacent, honest boy as you'd find in the seven parishes, an' he was a beautiful singer, an' an illegant dancer intirely, an' a mighty plisant boy in himself; but he had the divil's bad luck, for he married for love, an 'av coorse he niver had an asy minute afther. Nell Gorman was the girl he fancied, an' a beautiful slip of a girl she was, jist twinty to the minute when he married her. She was as round an' as complate in all her shapes as a...

Extract: CHAPTER I. MORTLAKE HALL. There stands about a mile and a half beyond Islington, unless it has come down within the last two years, a singular and grand old house. It belonged to the family of Arden, once distinguished in the Northumbrian counties. About fifty acres of ground, rich with noble clumps and masses of old timber, surround it; old-world fish-ponds, with swans sailing upon them, tall yew hedges, quincunxes, leaden fauns and goddesses, and other obsolete splendours surround it. It rises, tall, florid, built of Caen stone, with a palatial flight of steps, and something of the...

When Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's first novel, The Cock and Anchor, first appeared in 1845, critics were quick to hail it as a work worthy of Sir Walter Scott and predicted that its anonymous author might be the national novelist Ireland had been waiting for. Set against the historical backdrop of turbulent mid-eighteenth century Dublin, The Cock and Anchoris the story of heroic young O'Connor, who wants nothing more than to marry the beautiful Miss Mary Ashwoode. But her father, the wicked Sir Richard, who just may have struck a bargain with the devil, is firmly opposed and has resolved to...

Extract CHAPTER I. Sir Jekyl Marlowe at the Plough Inn. The pretty little posting station, known as the Plough Inn, on the Old London Road, where the Sterndale Road crosses it, was in a state of fuss and awe, at about five o'clock on a fine sharp October evening, for Sir Jekyl Marlowe, a man of many thousand acres, and M.P. for the county, was standing with his back to the fire, in the parlour, whose bow-window looks out on the ancient thoroughfare I have mentioned, over the row of scarlet geraniums which beautify the window-stone. "Hollo " cried the Baronet, as the bell-rope came down in...

Extract: CHAPTER I. Lady Alice and Varbarriere tete-a-tete in the Library. "Well, he told you something, did not he?" persisted Lady Alice. "In the sense of a distinct disclosure, nothing," said the Bishop, looking demurely over his horizontal leg on the neatly-shorn grass. "He did speak to me upon subjects-his wishes, and I have no doubt he intended to have been much more explicit. In fact, he intimated as much; but he was overtaken by death-unable to speak when I saw him next morning." "He spoke to you, I know, about pulling down or blowing up that green chamber," said Lady Alice, whose...