ABSTRACT
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin on 14 August 1814; his father was a nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and himself descended from an ennobled Huguenot family. Joseph Le Fanu and his younger brother William were fond of playing practical jokes, and in their youth it was often their good-natured father who found himself the victim. Le Fanu began writing at an early age, contributing to the Dublin University Magazines in 1832 he joined the staff, and continued as a contributor, eventually becoming editor and proprietor. In his memoirs William Tinsley wrote: ‘In 1863 we published Sheridan Le Fanu’s first acknowledged three-volume novel, called The House by the Churchyard. The last of Le Fanu’s novels to be published by Tinsley, The Wyvern Mystery, was dedicated to the judge, William Keogh. Le Fanu succeeded in pacifying Keogh; but to the end of his life the judge was ignorant of the cause of the trouble.
