In A Glass Darkly

By Sheridan Le Fanu and David Stuart Davies

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was one of the great masters of Victorian of mystery and horror fiction, and can be regarded as the father of the modern ghost story. In a Glass Darkly (1872), one of his most celebrated volumes, purports to be the casebook of Dr Hesselius, a pioneer psychologist.

These five tales represent some of Le Fanu's most accomplished work, which rises above the staid conventions of the age. Although drawing on Gothic conventions - the book features both ghosts and vampires - Le Fanu redefined the parameters of supernatural fiction. He had little interest in the crude depiction of other worldly phenomena in order to provide the reader with a pleasurable frisson of fear. Le Fanu concern rather lay in the examination of the results of supernatural experience on the psyche of his protagonist, in this he paved the way for the work of Henry James and M. R. James.

This volume is an indispensable cornerstone of modern horror and remains one of the finest collections of unsettling fiction in the language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848705104

Sheridan Le Fanu

J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer who helped develop the ghost story genre in the nineteenth century. Born to a family of writers, Le Fanu released his first works in 1838 in Dublin University Magazine, which he would go on to edit and publish in 1861. Some of Le Fanu’s most famous Victorian Gothic works include Carmilla, Uncle Silas, and In a Glass Darkly. His writing has inspired other great authors of horror and thriller literature such as Bram Stoker and M. R. James.

Book preview

IN A GLASS DARKLY

J. Sheridan le Fanu

with an introduction by

Paul M. Chapman

In a Glass Darkly first published by

Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1995

Published as an ePublication 2011

ISBN 978 1 84870 510 4

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ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

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Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

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INTRODUCTION

Although his literary star has long been eclipsed, during his lifetime Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a contemporary of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, was a popular and well-known author, both in England and his native Ireland. Yet today he is principally remembered for two works: the outstanding mystery novel Uncle Silas (1864) and this superlative collection of supernaturally-themed stories, In a Glass Darkly (1872), which is one of the most indispensable volumes in the entire genre of the mystery and supernatural.

The scion of a family of Irish and Huguenot ancestry, Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, on 28 August 1814. At the time his father, Thomas – a nephew of the great dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan – was a curate of Dr William Dobbin, rector of Finglas, whose daughter, Emma, he had married in 1811.

In 1815 Thomas was appointed chaplain of the Hibernian Military School in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. This setting, which was obviously conducive to young Joseph’s already active imagination, was to inform a number of his later works, including the novels The Cock and Anchor (1845) and The House by the Churchyard (1863), and three short ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’ (1851).

In 1826 the family moved again when Thomas was appointed rector of Abington in Co. Limerick. This rural location provided the future novelist with his first serious experiences of the deep class and religious divisions within Irish society. To the local Catholic population the Le Fanus symbolised the Protestant ascendancy and accordingly they encountered hatred and violence at first hand. Despite this (and the High Tory views he espoused in his maturity) Joseph was sympathetic towards the downtrodden Catholic peasantry, an understanding which would find literary expression in his ballads ‘Shamus O’ Brien’ and ‘Phaudhrig Crohoore’. His first two novels, The Cock and Anchor and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’ Brien (1847) – which exhibit the influence of his literary hero, Sir Walter Scott – also deal in a sober fashion with the themes of Irish nationalism.

But Le Fanu was not destined for a rural existence and in 1832 he re-entered the world of his peers when he enrolled at Dublin’s Trinity College to read classics and to train for a career in the law. Although he was called to the Irish Bar in 1839 he displayed little enthusiasm for the legal profession. Instead he was to make his living in the worlds of journalism and publishing, during which time he was both a writer and a newspaper proprietor, owning The Warder and the Protestant Guardian. He also held a third share in The Statesman, the Dublin Evening Packet and the Dublin Evening Mail.

Le Fanu’s first published ghost story, ‘The Ghost and the Bone-Setter’, had appeared in January 1838 in the Dublin University Magazine, and over the next thirty years many of his most celebrated works would début in its pages, including ‘Schalken the Painter’ (1839), ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ (1853), The House by the Churchyard, Uncle Silas (as Maud Ruthyn) and Wylder’s Hand (1863–4) and The Wyvern Mystery (1869). In fact, in July 1861 he bought this periodical – which, despite its name, had no formal connection to the university.

As he was beginning to establish his business and literary reputation Le Fanu also acquired domestic responsibilities. In December 1843 he married Susanna Bennett, the daughter of George Bennett, Q.C. The union was a true love-match and produced four children. However, Susanna was a delicate and nervous woman, whose symptoms worsened with the death of her father in 1856. Her own death followed two years later, leaving her husband distraught and bewildered.

Throughout the domestic upheavals of the 1850s Le Fanu had produced little new fiction, but after his wife’s death he found solace in his writing. Much of this work was formulaic and repetitive, but this period also witnessed the publication of some of his most memorable and accomplished stories.

In the years following his bereavement he slowly withdrew from society, preferring to dwell with his ghosts within the walls of 18 (now 70) Merrion Square, Dublin; so much so that he became popularly known as ‘The Invisible Prince’. It was during the latter phase of this reclusive and (according to his son Brinsley) nocturnal existence, and shortly before his death in 1873, that he wrote four of the five stories comprising In a Glass Darkly.

In order to give this disparate set of stories some sense of cohesion, Le Fanu employed the framing device of presenting them as a collection of curious and interesting cases which had come to the attention of one Dr Martin Hesselius, described by his admiring understudy as:

. . . a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession . . . His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight.

Hesselius can be seen as a proto-psychologist, and also as a shadowy foretaste of the semi-scientific psychic investigators who underwent a fictional vogue in the early twentieth century; characters like Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki. Most of all, however, he has been cited as an influence on Bram Stoker’s vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing (note the similarity of name), in Dracula (1897).

The case for the effect of Le Fanu’s works upon the development of Van Helsing is further strengthened in reading of Hesselius’s friend, Professor Van Loo of Leyden, something of a Renaissance man, who ‘was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play’. Notably Stoker describes his Dutch professor as ‘a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind’.

Whatever the influence of Le Fanu’s characters upon Van Helsing, Stoker’s creation is ultimately more energetic and successful than Dr Hesselius, who appears to be both dilatory and ineffectual in ‘Green Tea’, the one recorded case in which he is directly involved.

One of Le Fanu’s most celebrated stories, ‘Green Tea’ relates the self-destructive mental descent of the Reverend Robert Lysander Jennings, an inoffensive scholar, assiduous in his clerical duties, whose only indulgences are an over enthusiasm for libraries and a weakness for green tea. But the steady tenor of his uneventful life is overturned when, travelling home on a late-night omnibus, he perceives the presence of a ghostly black monkey, which, try as he might to dispel it, becomes a constant and unwanted companion, whose baleful influence leads Jennings to the brink of madness.

In its loose outline ‘Green Tea’ can sound catchpenny, even faintly ludicrous, and in lesser hands it would have been forgettable. However Le Fanu gives the story an overarching symbolic and psychological resonance. This particular tale exemplifies many of the changes he had been introducing into the time-honoured ghost-story formula, which had become atrophied within the constraints of folkloric and Gothic traditions and expectations; conventions which had even hamstrung some of Edgar Allan Poe’s more progressive stories concerning neurotic sensibilities in the first half of the nineteenth century.

All too often Poe found histrionics difficult to resist, whereas Le Fanu embraced understatement and a sense of proportion as guiding principles in his stories – hence his inspired choice of a small monkey as Mr Jennings’s bête noire. A creature normally associated with charming and comic antics here becomes a threatening, even perverse, manifestation of raw wickedness, exuding malevolence and whispering obscenities.

Ambiguity and a sense of human powerlessness in the face of incomprehensible forces often mark the end of Le Fanu’s stories and are encountered in ‘The Familiar’, whose protagonist, Captain Barton, is plagued by the malignant spirit of one of the sailors who had served under him. But here the persecution has a motive. Barton, partly driven by spite and impatience, had ordered the man to be flogged to death.

Although more conventional in spirit than ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’ is certainly not formulaic. Le Fanu evokes a palpable, and carefully developed, atmosphere of dread as Barton is relentlessly pursued by his nemesis, to the point where the supporting cast clearly regard the captain as inhabiting the borderlands of insanity. Yet, in another departure from so many of his contemporaries, Le Fanu renders the wretched Barton – despite the wrongs of his past – as a sympathetic and remorseful individual.

The eponymous subject of ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ is in a different league altogether. Possibly based upon the infamous Judge Jeffreys, Harbottle is a hanging judge of the worst sort: capricious, self-serving and anything but just. In fact, the sort of character Le Fanu would doubtless have encountered amongst the landowning classes of Ireland and their myrmidons.

‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ is closer in its thematic concerns to ‘The Familiar’, when the vengeful spirit of one of the judge’s legal-murder victims returns in order to show him the error of his ways. In a particularly memorable courtroom dream sequence Harbottle, placed in the dock, is forced into some form of self-awareness by an interesting use of the doppelgänger motif.

Upon a first reading, ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ seems somewhat out of place in this collection as there is no actual, and little implied, supernaturalism (other than the deliberately hackneyed assurance that the titular inn is haunted). It stands, rather, as a fine showcase for Le Fanu’s talents as a writer of mystery and crime adventures.

The plot concerns a naïve and rich young Englishman, Richard Beckett, who is touring France in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. He becomes infatuated with a beautiful French Countess and is thereby unwittingly drawn into a web of danger and deceit, and almost pays the ultimate price for his incomprehension.

However, beneath the surface of this conventional, almost melodramatic, scenario runs a genuinely dark undercurrent, heightened by the fictional use of early post-Napoleonic France, a state demoralised by defeat, yet relieved by the final cessation of hostilities. Amidst the confusion, few characters are actually who they appear to be, creating a setting fraught with menace in a country used to violence, having just undergone a quarter-century of civil strife and foreign wars. Yet not all is potential brutality. There are also more refined terrors, most notably a Poesque moment in which the drugged Beckett is almost buried alive by his criminal persecutors.

The theme of the innocent in peril also lies at the heart of ‘Carmilla’, which is perhaps Le Fanu’s best-known story. It is unquestionably one of the most elegant and accomplished of all vampire narratives, moving this particular sub-genre onwards (certainly in English) from the clumsy efforts of its pioneers. Although any specific sources remain unclear, ‘Carmilla’ owes little to the juvenile horrors and banalities of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and James Malcolm Rymer’s rambling penny dreadful Varney the Vampyre (1847). It has rather more in common with (and this may have been a manifestation of Le Fanu’s French ancestry) the subtleties, symbolism and tantalising eroticism of Théophile Gautier’s ‘La Morte Amoureuse’ (1836) and Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Les Metamorphoses du Vampire’(1857).

Instead of a rampaging male vampire of the Byronic type, ‘Carmilla’ features a beautiful and languorous female revenant whose preferred, although not exclusive, victims are of her own class and sex. The story is related by one of these victims, Laura, whose father is English but inhabits a venerable castle in Styria – ‘Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest.’ For Le Fanu this is an uncharacteristic use of a traditional and overtly clichéd Gothic setting. But his plot development bears little relationship to the rather mechanical ‘horrid tales’ of Horace Walpole ( 1717–97) and his imitators.

Into this solitude there arrives a beautiful stranger who calls herself Carmilla. Her appearance and presence remind Laura of a disturbing and dreamlike experience during her childhood, in which a young lady entered her bedchamber unbidden, but vanished before she could be questioned.

Carmilla’s arrival occurs shortly after the untimely and inexplicable death of General Spielsdorf’s niece, who was to have been a companion for Laura. It also coincides with the outbreak of a mysterious fatal malady amongst the local peasantry. She, however, is concerned only with Laura, towards whom she displays rather too forward an affection:

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear . . . And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.

Vampirism is an obvious sexual metaphor, but in Le Fanu’s hands the blatant is distilled into something more intangible. Even his introduction of a lesbian subtext appears not to have ruffled any puritan feathers. The great ghost-story writer M. R. James, an avowed and enthusiastic admirer of Le Fanu’s work, wrote, in his essay ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’: ‘[S]ex is tiresome enough in novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.’

Nevertheless, he must have recognised that sex is an underlying, yet definite, driving force in a number of Le Fanu’s stories, including ‘Carmilla’, which (together with ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’) James considered to be ‘unsurpassed’. Perhaps he was mollified by Laura’s reaction to Carmilla’s attempted seduction:

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable but was ever and anon mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust.

This ambiguous response to the vampiric sexual advance finds a later fictional echo in Dracula (one of a number to occur in Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, which was certainly influenced by ‘Carmilla’) during Jonathan Harker’s erotic encounter with three female vampires in Castle Dracula.

In a Glass Darkly is one of the most important books in the shaping of modern horror and supernatural fiction. It is a cornerstone, but should never be read simply in order to gauge its influence upon other writers. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was a master of his craft, and the five stories in this collection are amongst his best. Appreciate them on their own terms and you will find the rewards are manifold.

PAUL M. CHAPMAN

IN A GLASS DARKLY

Green Tea

Prologue

Martin Hesselius, the German Physician

Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term ‘easy circumstances’. He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

In Dr Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast like me with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well founded.

For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when, in this style of narrative, he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door to the light of day or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art, and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.

Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.

It is related in a series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.

The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.

These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful though, I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there I omit some passages, and shorten others, and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.

1

Dr Hesselius Relates How He Met the Reverend Mr Jennings

The Reverend Mr Jennings is tall and thin. He is middle-aged, and dresses with a natty, old-fashioned, high-church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff. His features, without being handsome, are well formed, and their expression extremely kind, but also shy.

I met him one evening at Lady Mary Heyduke’s. The modesty and benevolence of his countenance are extremely prepossessing.

We were but a small party, and he joined agreeably enough in the conversation. He seems to enjoy listening very much more than contributing to the talk; but what he says is always to the purpose and well said. He is a great favourite of Lady Mary’s, who, it seems, consults him upon many things, and thinks him the most happy and blessed person on earth. Little knows she about him.

The Reverend Mr Jennings is a bachelor, and has, they say, sixty thousand pounds in the funds. He is a charitable man. He is most anxious to be actively employed in his sacred profession, and yet, though always tolerably well elsewhere, when he goes down to his vicarage in Warwickshire, to engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling, his health soon fails him, and in a very strange way. So says Lady Mary.

There is no doubt that Mr Jennings’ health does break down in generally a sudden and mysterious way, sometimes in the very act of officiating in his old and pretty church at Kenlis. It may be his heart, it may be his brain. But it has happened three or four times, or oftener, that after proceeding a certain way in the service, he has on a sudden stopped short, and after a silence, apparently quite unable to resume, he has fallen into solitary, inaudible prayer, his hands and his eyes uplifted, and then pale as death, and in the agitation of a strange shame and horror, descended trembling, and got into the vestry-room, leaving his congregation, without explanation, to themselves. This occurred when his curate was absent. When he goes down to Kenlis now, he always takes care to provide a clergyman to share his duty, and to supply his place on the instant should he become thus suddenly incapacitated.

When Mr Jennings breaks down quite, and beats a retreat from the vicarage, and returns to London, where, in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house, Lady Mary says that he is always perfectly well. I have my own opinion about that. There are degrees of course. We shall see.

Mr Jennings is a perfectly gentlemanlike man. People, however, remark something odd. There is an impression a little ambiguous. One thing which certainly contributes to it people, I think, don’t remember; or, perhaps, distinctly remark. But I did, almost immediately. Mr Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs only now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

A medical philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood of rewarding enquiry.

There was a promise of this kind in the slight, timid, kindly, but reserved gentleman, whom I met for the first time at this agreeable little evening gathering. I observed, of course, more than I here set down; but I reserve all that borders on the technical for a strictly scientific paper.

I may remark that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope someday to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body – a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection ‘in power’.

The person who weighs the consequences of these positions will probably see their practical bearing upon medical science. This is, however, by no means the proper place for displaying the proofs and discussing the consequences of this too generally unrecognised state of facts.

In pursuance of my habit, I was covertly observing Mr Jennings – with all my caution, I think he perceived it – and I saw plainly that he was as cautiously observing me. Lady Mary happening to address me by my name, as Dr Hesselius, I saw that he glanced at me more sharply, and then became thoughtful for a few minutes.

After this, as I conversed with a gentleman at the other end of the room, I saw him look at me more steadily, and with an interest which I thought I understood. I then saw him take an opportunity of chatting with Lady Mary, and was, as one always is, perfectly aware of being the subject of a distant enquiry and answer.

This tall clergyman approached me by and by; and in a little time we had got into conversation. When two people who like reading and know books and places, having travelled, wish to discourse, it is very strange if they can’t find topics. It was not accident that brought him near me, and led him into conversation. He knew German, and had read my Essays on Metaphysical Medicine, which suggest more than they actually say.

This courteous man – gentle, shy, plainly a man of thought and reading, who moving and talking among us, was not altogether of us, and whom I already suspected of leading a life whose transactions and alarms were carefully concealed, with an impenetrable reserve, from not only the world, but from his best beloved friends – was cautiously weighing in his own mind the idea of taking a certain step with regard to me.

I penetrated his thoughts without his being aware of it, and was careful to say nothing which could betray to his sensitive vigilance my suspicions respecting his position, or my surmises about his plans respecting myself.

We chatted upon indifferent subjects for a time but at last he said: ‘I was very much interested by some papers of yours, Dr Hesselius, upon what you term metaphysical medicine. I read them in German, ten or twelve years ago – have they been translated?’

‘No, I’m sure they have not – I should have heard. They would have asked my leave, I think.’

‘I asked the publishers here, a few months ago, to get the book for me in the original German; but they tell me it is out of print.’

‘So it is, and has been for some years; but it flatters me as an author to find that you have not forgotten my little book, although,’ I added, laughing, ‘ten or twelve years is a considerable time to have managed without it; but I suppose you have been turning the subject over again in your mind, or something has happened lately to revive your interest in it.’

At this remark, accompanied by a glance of enquiry, a sudden embarrassment disturbed Mr Jennings, analogous to that which makes a young lady blush and look foolish. He dropped his eyes, and folded his hands together uneasily, and looked oddly, and you would have said, guiltily, for a moment.

I helped him out of his awkwardness in the best way, by appearing not to observe it, and going straight on, I said: ‘Those revivals of interest in a subject happen to me often; one book suggests another, and often sends me back on a wild-goose chase over an interval of twenty years. But if you still care to possess a copy, I shall be only too happy to provide you; I have still got two or three by me – and if you allow me to present one, I shall be very much honoured.’

‘You are very good indeed,’ he said, quite at his ease again, in a moment: ‘I almost despaired – I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Pray don’t say a word; the thing is really of so little worth that I am only ashamed of having offered it, and if you thank me any more I shall throw it into the fire in a fit of modesty.’

Mr Jennings laughed. He enquired where I was staying in London, and after a little more conversation on a variety of subjects, he took his departure.

2

The Doctor Questions Lady Mary, and She Answers

‘I like your vicar so much, Lady Mary,’ said I, as soon as he was gone. ‘He has read, travelled, and thought, and having also suffered, he ought to be an accomplished companion.’

‘So he is, and, better still, he is a really good man,’ said she. ‘His advice is invaluable about my schools, and all my little undertakings at Dawlbridge, and he’s so painstaking, he takes so much trouble – you have no idea – wherever he thinks he can be of use: he’s so good-natured and so sensible.’

‘It is pleasant to hear so good an account of his neighbourly virtues. I can only testify to his being an agreeable and gentle companion, and in addition to what you have told me, I think I can tell you two or three things about him,’ said I.

‘Really!’

‘Yes, to begin with, he’s unmarried.’

‘Yes, that’s right – go on.’

‘He has been writing, that is he was, but for two or three years perhaps, he has not gone on with his work, and the book was upon some rather abstract subject – perhaps theology.’

‘Well, he was writing a book, as you say; I’m not quite sure what it was about, but only that it was nothing that I cared for; very likely you are right, and he certainly did stop – yes.’

‘And although he only drank a little coffee here tonight, he likes tea, at least, did like it, extravagantly.’

‘Yes, that’s quite true.’

‘He drank green tea, a good deal, didn’t he?’ I pursued.

‘Well, that’s very odd! Green tea was a subject on which we used almost to quarrel.’

‘But he has quite given that up,’ said I.

‘So he has.’

‘And, now, one more fact. His mother or his father, did you know them?’

‘Yes, both; his father is only ten years dead, and their place is near Dawlbridge. We knew them very well,’ she answered.

‘Well, either his mother or his father – I should rather think his father, saw a ghost,’ said I.

‘Well, you really are a conjurer, Dr Hesselius.’

‘Conjurer or no, haven’t I said right?’ I answered merrily.

‘You certainly have, and it was his father: he was a silent, whimsical man, and he used to bore my father about his dreams, and at last he told him a story about a ghost he had seen and talked with, and a very odd story it was. I remember it particularly, because I was so afraid of him. This story was long before he died – when I was quite a child – and his ways were so silent and moping, and he used to drop in sometimes, in the dusk, when I was alone in the drawing-room, and I used to fancy there were ghosts about him.’

I smiled and nodded.

‘And now, having established my character as a conjurer, I think I must say good-night,’ said I.

‘But how did you find it out?’

‘By the planets, of course, as the gypsies do,’ I answered, and so, gaily, we said good-night.

Next morning I sent the little book he had been enquiring after and a note to Mr Jennings, and on returning late that evening, I found that he had called at my lodgings and left his card. He asked whether I was at home, and asked at what hour he would be most likely to find me.

Does he intend opening his case, and consulting me ‘professionally’, as they say? I hope so. I have already conceived a theory about him. It is supported by Lady Mary’s answers to my parting questions. I should like to ascertain more from his own lips. But what can I do consistent with good breeding to invite a confession? Nothing. I rather think he meditates one. At all events, my dear Van Loo, I shan’t make myself difficult of access; I mean to return his visit tomorrow. It will be only civil, in return for his politeness, to ask to see him. Perhaps something may come of it. Whether much, little, or nothing, my dear Van Loo, you shall hear.

3

Dr Hesselius Picks Up Something in Latin Books

Well, I have called at Bolton Street.

On enquiring at the door, I was told by the servant that Mr Jennings was engaged very particularly with a gentleman, a clergyman from Kenlis, his parish in the country. Intending to reserve my privilege and to call again, I merely intimated that I should try another time, and had turned to go when the servant begged my pardon and asked me, looking at me a little more attentively than well-bred persons of his order usually do, whether I was Dr Hesselius; and, on learning that I was, he said, ‘Perhaps then, sir, you would allow me to mention it to Mr Jennings, for I am sure he wishes to see you.’

The servant returned in a moment with a message from Mr Jennings asking me to go into his study, which was in effect his back drawing-room, and promising to be with me in a very few minutes.

This was really a study – almost a library. The room was lofty, with two tall slender windows and rich dark curtains. It was much larger than I had expected and stacked with books on every side, from the floor to the ceiling. The upper carpet – for to my tread it felt that there were two or three – was a Turkey carpet. My steps fell noiselessly. The way the bookcases stood out placed the windows, particularly narrow ones, in deep recesses. The effect of the room was, although extremely comfortable, and even luxurious, decidedly gloomy, and aided by the silence, almost oppressive. Perhaps, however, I ought to have allowed something for association. My mind had connected peculiar ideas with Mr Jennings. I stepped into this perfectly silent room, of a very silent house, with a peculiar foreboding; and its darkness, and solemn clothing of books – for except where two narrow looking-glasses were set in the wall, they were everywhere – helped this sombre feeling.

While awaiting Mr Jennings’ arrival, I amused myself by looking into some of the books with which his shelves were laden. Not among

Reviews for In A Glass Darkly

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of five stories - three short stories and two novellas, by this 19th century Irish author of supernatural and horror stories. The five stories are all linked as being supposedly papers from the collection of a scholar of paranormal phenomena, Dr Martin Hesselius. Of the five, by far the best is probably Le Fanu's most famous story, the vampire novella "Carmilla", a superb classic of horror literature and the most significant influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula and the horror film spin offs of the last century or so, containing all the tropes of vampire literature, i.e. the isolated castle somewhere in the middle of Europe, the extinct noble family with a dark secret, etc.None of the other four stories are of the same standard, in my view. The other novella, "The Room in the Dragon Volant", about the adventures of an English milord in France in 1815 after Napoleon's fall, was rather long-winded, and indeed almost a full novel, consisting of 26 short chapters. It started off feeling a bit like a Conan Doyle Brigadier Gerard story and finished dramatically like an Edgar Allan Poe story, but meandered too much in between. The three short stories all featured people haunted to death by spectres, and all successfully built up an atmosphere of creeping dread, while lacking the majesty and rich atmosphere of "Carmilla". The best of these was probably "Mr Justice Harbottle", where an 18th judge is haunted to his death by the ghost of a man he wrongly convicted to the gallows. "The Familiar" was a similar haunting, though for a more ambiguous reason, while in "Green Tea", a man is haunted by a spectral monkey due to having drunk too much of the eponymous beverage, which allegedly unduly exposes the brain of the drinker to disembodied spirits (!). So, overall a mixed collection.

[laurochka-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not quite as thrilling as I'd expected. The Room in the Dragon Volant was my favourite story. A quick read if you like old school ghost and mystery tales.

[hglotzbach_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Carmilla alone deserves a 5 star (incredible vampire story that inspired Bram Stoker). However, I felt the rest of the short stories were very repetitive.

[mathmaverick-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent collection of five short stories! Comparable to O'Henry and Maupassant in quality. I like to refer to these stories as 19th century twilight zones. I especially liked "Mr Justice Harbottle" and "The Room of Dragon Volant", both of which had great turns at the end. The last story, Carmilla, also had a great twist, but was much more predictable (although still very suspenceful).

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed these subtly creepy tales.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good, scary stories. Some may find it too mild considering today's formula for throat-slashing as being somehow novel. I recommend it to see how true originality compares to the boiler-plate drivel that is produced today.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pretty fun. The first three stories, "Green Tea," "The Watcher," and "Mr. Justice Harbottle," are that type of indirect horror focusing on the psychological effects on a protagonist--and thus on using that protagonist as a representation of a particular psychological illness, dramatized by the horror-story setting. "The Room in the Dragon Volant" is then a detective story rather than a horror story, one in which Le Fanu's enjoyment of setting up shocking twist after shocking twist is palpable. It all comes together in "Carmilla," which reflects both these tendencies. If good writing for you is all about well-chosen words and non-trundling sentences, this ain't it, but if it's about striking and creepy images that last, this is a good early model.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

More good reading from Le Fanu, though I found I liked the two final tales ("The Room in the Dragon Volant" and "Carmilla") better than most of the others. Excellent for a dark and stormy night. Not quite as good as M.R. James at his best, but certainly worth a read if you like this sort of thing.

[imyril · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've read half of this collection, which is as much as I'm willing to commit to. Classic Victorian horror, which is to say wildly variable by modern standards - the first in the collection, Green Tea, is neither horrible nor interesting, so makes a terrible introduction. The last, Carmilla, is a classic vampire tale and I thoroughly enjoyed it as an early example of the genre - but not quite enough to make me go back and read the 3 tales in between.

[overthemoon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a good collection of stories though not quite as horrifying as I expected. The first one, with the haunting monkey, was the weakest; I thoroughly enjoyed the intrigue of the Dragon Volant, not really knowing where it was leading, and the last one, Carmilla, was quite sensual though it finished too abruptly, as many vampire stories do.

[thewasp_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A collection of gothic short stories taken from a "collection" of papers and reports from Dr Martin Hesselius, who had fascination with "metaphysical medicine".The stories are well written and engaging.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a Glass Darkly is made up of five short stories (although "Dragon Volant" is long enough to be classified as a novella) that are a mix of ghost stories, horror, mystery and fantastic. Each story is a little stranger than the last which makes for the perfect Halloween-time read especially with the lights dimmed low. The book ends with the short story "Carmilla" about a lesbian vampire who needs more than victims to survive. "Carmilla" appears to have the most success out of all the short stories, prompting other authors to write similar vampire stories with greater success.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The stories here hold some of the beginnings of what we now consider the horror genre, and they stand up to time as tales that are both chilling and fascinating. That said, the best of the bunch are easily "The Familiar" and "Carmilla"; "The Familiar" is haunting and strange--it stays with you, and that's all that needs to be said. "Carmilla" is one of the early vampire stories that directly speaks of vampires, and worthwhile not only as a story in itself, but for someone looking for the roots of vampirism in contemporary literature. "The Room in the Dragon Volant" is the one story that drags somewhat, but still, it's worth the read. On a separate note, while I fully recommend this book to lovers of horror and the supernatural, I do not recommend this particular edition that I came across, from Adamant Media Corporation, Elibron Classics. The number of typos and mistakes were, in all truth, infuriating. Nevertheless, the stories made the book well worth my time. I'd give the book four and a half stars, this edition one...hence, I settled on three.

[patience_crabstick · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

These Victorian ghost stories are just OK--not particularly scary, except for the last one, "Carmilla." Le Fanu indulges in the irritating Victorian practice of finishing a date or street address with a dash, (We arrived in N___ St.) I'm glad that device has gone out of style.