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    Lafcadio Hearn
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Ebook65 pages59 minutes

    Lafcadio Hearn

    By Edward Thomas

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    About this ebook

    This antiquarian book contains a detailed and insightful biography of Lafcadio Hearn. Born on the Greek island of Lefkada, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn ( 1850 - 1904) was an internationally renowned writer. He is best remembered for his books about Japan, particularly those that concern Japanese legends and ghost stories. Edward Thomas’s biography offers a unique insight into the life and mind of this incredible writer, and constitutes a must-read for those with an interest in Hearn’s life and work. Philip Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917) was an Anglo-Welsh author best remembered for his war poetry. This vintage book is being republished in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781473393707
    Lafcadio Hearn
    Author

    Edward Thomas

    Edward Thomas was born near Uxbridge in 1943 and grew up mainly in Hackney, east London in the 1950s. His teaching career took him to cental Africa and the Middle East. Early retirement from the profession enabled him to concentrate on writing. Along with authorship of half a dozen books, he has contributed regular columns to several journals.

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    • 4/5
      An unambiguous and compact viewing of the chameleonic world of Hearn with valuable tidbits deciphering his works and imaginings.

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    Lafcadio Hearn - Edward Thomas

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    I

    IN one of his last essays Lafcadio Hearn said that he would like to be buried in the old Buddhist graveyard behind his garden. He liked the place for its beauty and antiquity, and for its great bell. This bell had a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far away from all the nineteenth century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them, make one afraid—deliciously afraid:¹ it caused a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscuration of a million million deaths and births. It is a thought easily to be paralleled in any of his books. More than any other man he appears to have been unable to forget the dark backward and abyss of his own immemorial past. Is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who dwell within us?² is a sentence which shows what governed his thinking. He himself knew less of his immediate ancestors than most men, but though he would not have expected any great illumination from a far fuller knowledge he was fond of dwelling upon his childhood and origin. How much he knew of them is uncertain. What he has said and what others have unearthed amounts to little—a suggestive and surprising little, though not enough to satisfy the man who was so impressed by the continual resurrection of the past, that he found the worship of ancestors an extremely righteous thing.³ The Hearns are said to have been a Dorsetshire family with a tradition of gipsy blood,⁴ but settled since the end of the seventeenth century in Ireland. The head of the family was then Dean of Cashel. He had eight sons who were soldiers, and of these one was Hearn’s grandfather. His father was Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, who fell in love with a Greek girl, Rosa Cerigote, while he was in garrison, carried her off and married her. Lafcadio, named from the island of his birth, Lefcada, was the second, but first surviving, child, born on June 27, 1850: his infant speech was Romaic and Italian. Surgeon-Major Hearn took his family to Ireland six years later, and soon afterwards his wife ran away from him or Ireland, never to return. He married again and Lafcadio, being adopted by a great-aunt, never saw father or mother after the age of seven, He remembered that his mother was small, black-haired and black-eyed, and that only once did he feel glad with his father. He favoured his mother, and sometimes thought there was nothing in him, physical or mental, of his father; but Miss Bisland says that the children of his father’s second wife were much like Lafcadio, with dark skins, delicate aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit figures.⁵ He himself said that he got his impatience, sensitiveness and affection from his mother, and what pride and persistence he had from his

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