Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and he spent most of his adult life in a Georgian townhouse on Merrion Square.
He rarely left Ireland, hardly ever ventured into the kind of cathedral close or East Anglian landscape that would later become M. R. James’s territory, and he drew his imaginative material from a tradition substantially different from the English ghost story that would claim him as an influence.
Yet claim him it did.
Le Fanu’s story Green Tea (1869), in which a clergyman is haunted to destruction by a small spectral monkey, is one of the founding documents of the psychological ghost story. Carmilla (1872) established the vampire as a figure of lesbian desire decades before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. The collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) defines a mode of ghost writing — intimate, psychological, suffused with guilt — that the English tradition absorbed and made central to its own.
What it did not absorb, or absorbed only partially, was where Le Fanu’s imagination actually came from.
The Anglo-Irish position
Le Fanu belonged to the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy — the landowning class that had governed Ireland on England’s behalf since the seventeenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century this class was entering a long decline that would accelerate catastrophically in the Land Wars of the 1880s and the Revolutionary period of 1916-22, eventually extinguishing the Big House world almost entirely.
Le Fanu wrote about haunting from within a social position that was, structurally speaking, a haunted one. The Anglo-Irish landowning class occupied land they did not originally own, administered a population whose religion and culture they had systematically suppressed, and maintained their position through an increasingly precarious arrangement with the English state. The guilt this produced (or could have produced) was the imaginative soil from which Le Fanu’s ghosts grew.
This is quite different from the English ghost tradition’s relationship to guilt and transgression. In M. R. James, the protagonist typically disturbs something that was better left alone; the haunting is a consequence of intellectual curiosity, of tampering. The guilt is episodic, arising from a specific transgression. In Le Fanu, the guilt is hereditary, structural, inescapable. The haunting precedes any particular action by the protagonist.
It is in the nature of the position to be haunted.
The Irish tradition proper
Behind Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish anxiety lay something older and more complex: the Irish supernatural tradition itself. Irish folklore maintains a rich and highly specific ghost mythology, distinct from the English version in several important respects.
The Irish ghost is frequently bound to the landscape of its origin in ways that are not primarily about terror but about obligation. The dead have claims on the living, particularly claims of kinship, and the relationship between the living and the ancestral dead in Irish tradition is more reciprocal — and more contractual — than its English equivalent. The banshee (from bean sídhe, woman of the fairy mound) does not simply announce death; she mourns it, with a grief that belongs to the family as much as to the spirit. The dead are not alien. They are family members who have moved to the other side of a permeable boundary.
The fairy mounds — the sídhe, the earthen tumuli associated in Irish belief with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the mythological earlier inhabitants of the land — add a dimension to the Irish supernatural that has no real English parallel. The supernatural in Ireland is not marginal. It is central, territorial, and of immense antiquity, associated with the original inhabitants of the land in a way that makes human occupation always feel provisional.
Le Fanu was Protestant, Unionist in politics, and wrote in English for English and Anglo-Irish audiences. He did not write the Irish supernatural tradition directly. But he wrote from within a society that took the supernatural seriously at a popular level, and his sense of the ghost as something with claims — as something owed rather than merely feared — reflects that background even when the surface of his fiction is resolutely European Gothic.
What the English borrowed
The English ghost tradition took from Le Fanu his psychological interiority and his willingness to locate horror in the mental state of the perceiver. The ghost in Green Tea might be a genuine apparition or might be a symptom of psychological breakdown; Le Fanu is entirely uninterested in resolving the question. This ambiguity, the haunting as potentially either external event or internal collapse, became central to the sophisticated English ghost story of the twentieth century.
It also took his formal control: the frame narrative, the retrospective account, the confessional voice that makes the reader complicit in the terror rather than merely a spectator of it.
What it did not take, or took only imperfectly, was Le Fanu’s sense of haunting as inheritance. The English tradition’s ghosts are typically earned by individuals through specific transgressions. Le Fanu’s ghosts are earned by families, by classes, by historical arrangements that no individual chose and no individual can undo. The Anglo-Irish Protestant finds himself haunted not because he has done anything wrong but because he exists, and his existence rests on foundations laid by his ancestors in ways he cannot now change. The guilt is structural and the haunting is permanent.
Le Fanu gave English horror its psychological subtlety. The tradition he came from, the one he half-translated, gave it something it could not quite domesticate: the idea that haunting might be a condition rather than an event. England borrowed the technique.
The depth from which it came remained, largely, on the other side of the Irish Sea.