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    The Last Heir of Castle Connor
    The Last Heir of Castle Connor
    The Last Heir of Castle Connor
    Ebook54 pages51 minutes

    The Last Heir of Castle Connor

    By Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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    About this ebook

    This early work by Sheridan Le Fanu was originally published in 1838. Born in Dublin in 1814, he came from a literary family of Huguenot origins; both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights,
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateOct 21, 2015
    ISBN9781473377974
    The Last Heir of Castle Connor
    Author

    Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

    Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic horror. Born in Dublin, Le Fanu was raised in a literary family. His mother, a biographer, and his father, a clergyman, encouraged his intellectual development from a young age. He began writing poetry at fifteen and went on to excel at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied law and served as Auditor of the College Historical Society. In 1838, shortly before he was called to the bar, he began contributing ghost stories to Dublin University Magazine, of which he later became editor and proprietor. He embarked on a career as a writer and journalist, using his role at the magazine as a means of publishing his own fictional work. Le Fanu made a name for himself as a pioneer of mystery and Gothic horror with such novels as The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864). Carmilla (1872), a novella, is considered an early work of vampire fiction and an important influence for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

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      Book preview

      The Last Heir of Castle Connor - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

      The Last Heir of

      Castle Connor

      By

      Sheridan Le Fanu

      Copyright © 2012 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      Joseph Sheridan le Fanu

      THE LAST HEIR OF CASTLE CONNOR

      Joseph Sheridan le Fanu

      Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814. His was a literary family of Huguenot origins; both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights, and his niece Rhoda Broughton would go on to become a successful novelist. Le Fanu’s family lived in a variety of locations around rural Ireland during his youth – the folk superstitions of which are said to have left a deep impression on him – and were financially hard-hit by the agitations of the Tithe Wars. In 1833, not long after the death of his father, Le Fanu entered Trinity College, Dublin to study law. While there, he was elected Auditor of the College Historical Society, and between 1838 and 1840 published his first series of short stories, which were later collected as The Purcell Papers.

      Le Fanu was called to the bar in 1839, but he never practiced and soon abandoned law for journalism. During the 1840s, he married, and spent time mounting a protest against the indifference of the government to the Irish Famine. He also produced his first two novels - The C’ock and Anchor (1845) and The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847); both works of historical fiction – and in 1851 he and his wife Susanna moved to their house on Merrion Square, Dublin, where le Fanu was to remain until his death. In 1858, Le Fanu’s wife Susanna died in unclear circumstances, and he became a recluse, setting to work in his most productive and successful years as a writer. Between 1864 and 1872, he produced ten novels, all in the ‘sensation fiction’ genre popular at the time.

      At his peak, le Fanu was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and he is now seen as central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. His work is credited with turning the Gothic’s focus from the external sources of horror to the inward effects of terror, thus helping to create the psychological basis for supernaturalist literature that continues to this day. Arguably le Fanu’s most enduring works are Uncle Silas, published in 1864, and the vampire novella Carmilla (1872), which influenced Bram Stoker in the writing of Dracula and has inspired several films. Le Fanu died in his native Dublin in 1873, at the age of 58.

      THE LAST HEIR OF CASTLE CONNOR

      Being a third Extract from the legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P. P. of Drumcoolagh.

      -

      There is something in the decay of ancient grandeur to interest even the most unconcerned spectator--the evidences of greatness, of power, and of pride that survive the wreck of time, proving, in mournful contrast with present desolation and decay, what WAS in other days, appeal, with a resistless power, to the sympathies of our nature. And when, as we gaze on the scion of some ruined family, the first impulse of nature that bids us regard his fate with interest and respect is justified by the recollection of great exertions and self-devotion and sacrifices in the cause of a lost country and of a despised religion--sacrifices and efforts made with all the motives of faithfulness and of honour, and terminating in ruin--in such a case respect becomes veneration, and the interest we feel amounts almost to a passion.

      It is this feeling which has thrown the magic veil of romance over every roofless castle and ruined turret throughout our country; it is this feeling that, so long as a tower remains above the level of the soil, so long as one scion of a prostrate and impoverished family survives, will never suffer Ireland to yield to the stranger more than

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