ABSTRACT
Over a period of nearly thirty-seven years, from 1835 to 1872, the Anglo-Irish novelist and journalist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, developed the supernatural tale as both a sophisticated literary form with a complex poetics, and as a mode of theological enquiry. Le Fanu tends to envelop his tales within layer upon layer of nested narrations; this practice both adds to the reality effect of his ghostly visitors but also enables enough distance from the horror of their appearance for readerly delight as well as terror. The metaphysical structures employed by Le Fanu change over time. For those more familiar with the sophisticated novellas of the 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, Le Fanu’s first tale, written for Isaac Butts’s publication, The Dublin University Magazine, “The Ghost and the Bone-Setter” can seem a bizarre piece of cod-Irish folklore. In many of Le Fanu’s other stories, the layers of narrative unfold to reveal death as a reality at the heart of life.
