Product Description

Sheridan Le Fanu, wrote fellow author, M.R. James, 'stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories'. A best-selling author from 1860 to 1880, Le Fanu is feted today as a master of his art. In a Glass Darkly is a remarkable collection of tales of the supernatural, in which the patients of Dr Heselius are plagued by malignant apparitions and vampires, or are drugged into a state of living death. The good doctor can usually explain such phenomena in terms of psychopathology, but Le Fanu seems deliberately ambivalent about the doctor s theories, and many disturbing implications remain unsolved. Each story exerts the compelling appeal of a thoroughly good yarn, but In a Glass Darkly is a profoundly disorientating book that has become a classic of mystery and occult literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36590 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Robert Tracy has also edited The Macdermots of Ballycloran and Nina Balatka & Linda Tressel for the World's Classics.

Customer Reviews

Probably only scary if you suffer from a nervous psychological disorder
Some books are so bad that you just can't finish them. This isn't one of those books. Which is unforunate as when you read it you constantly wish you weren't. It's just so average. It doesn't have the ability to sweep you back into the Victorian world that a Dickens, Collins or Conan Doyle does. The ghost stories are not at all spine-chilling. They just feel very tepid. Le Fanu also falls into the habit of a lot of 19th Century writers of constructing incredibly arcane, unnecessarily-long sentences, meticulously grammatical at the expense of clarity, and separated by so many commas that by the time one reaches the end of the sentence, should one manage to hold one's attention to that point, one has already forgotten what was being conveyed at the sentence's beginning.

However I reserve my strongest condemnation for the notes. First* of all I* find it extremely distracting* to read when every other* word is marked* with an asterisk*. What confounded my annoyance is that the editor finds it necessary to explain words and concepts which really do not need explaining. So you think he has something of importance to explain and stop your reading to turn to the notes, search for the relevant point and then are left irritated as he tells you that such-and-such was written very slightly differently in an earlier version or defines a term that any fool would understand.

So why did I finish it? I think it has merits in having a place in the history of gothic fiction. Le Fanu occasionally finds interesting concepts and every now and then has a clever turn of phrase. But overall I would say this was a disappointing read, and if it had been a modern novel snobbery probably would have made me put it down.

read on...
This is a superb collection. Green tea is probably the least good but still good. The Familiar is a great tale of a man haunted by his past and eventually destroyed by it. Mr Justice Harbottle is very endearing and one of my favourite ghost stories. The Room in The Dragon Volant is long but well worth it - what could have been the perfect crime, if only...Carmilla, the vampire tale, is to my mind superior to Stoker's overlong Dracula, and was its inspiration.

An Apt Title.
Whatever the merits of Le Fanu's collection of short stories, the Wordsworth edition is dismal.

The typesetting errors are so frequent that it was only after some investigation that I began to believe that mine is not a bootlegged copy. The most common faults are wandering sem;i-colons, and all exclamation marks replaced with a space followed by a personal pronoun I this can cause confusion when placed in the middle of a sentence, as Le Fanu's old prose does not include capital letters following an exclamation mark.

Undoubtedly cheap, but only really worth it as an excercise in deciphering.