Known in nineteenth-century Dublin as ‘The Invisible Prince’ because of his reclusive and nocturnal habits, Le Fanu was fascinated by the occult.

In each we see some of the earliest uses of horror tropes that would come to influence Bram Stoker, Henry James, and even Stephen King. In A Glass Darkly puts these into practice in five short stories from the most prolific period of his career. This blurring of internal and external ‘haunting’ relied heavily on Swedenborgian theories of influx and correspondence, and his depictions of ‘spirits’ often evoked Swedenborg’s seminal study of the afterlife, Heaven and Hell. All rights reserved.Sheridan Le Fanu was a pioneering writer of horror fiction, known for using the Gothic imagery of ghosts and monsters to explore individual subjectivity. His theories within this collection of stories with respect to neurology and neuroscience, on the other hand, are much more representative of the eighteenth century, something that would be natural given that the stories contained in the collection were purported to have occurred in the latter decades of the eighteenth or early decades of the nineteenth century.ĭavid Hartley Emanuel Swedenborg hereditary dispositions inner visions medullary substance spirits suicidal mania supernatural. Hesselius' descriptions of psychological constructs are rather advanced for a physician discussing mental disorders in the nineteenth century. In this chapter, each of the stories in the collection will be described and analyzed for Hesselius' use of psychological, neurological, or mystical explanations for the events occurring within the story.

Each of these aspects of Le Fanu's fiction can be found in the 1872 collection In a Glass Darkly, which purports to contain five case histories of the German metaphysical physician Doctor Martin Hesselius. His male characters in particular suffer from guilty consciences, and suicide is a frequent fate. His characters frequently suffer from 'brain fevers' and other maladies that were the subject of intense debate in England, continental Europe, and America. His fiction also illustrates the emerging medical specialty of neurology, although Le Fanu's later writings are more illustrative of his interest in the mystical works of Emanuel Swedenborg. Le Fanu's works should be appreciated for the insights he provides into the psychology of his characters his fiction was written prior to what historians of psychology date as the formal establishment of the discipline in 1879, which occurred after his death. Excepting 'Green Tea' and 'Carmilla,' Sheridan Le Fanu's fiction is generally neglected by modern-day readers, yet his work reveals much information about the conduct of life in nineteenth century Ireland and England.

Le fanu in a glass darkly