Haunted Images:  The Illustrating of Le Fanu

Simon Cooke

(ISSN 1932-9598)

Acknowledgements

Use of images by Ardizzone is granted by permission of the Estate of Edward Ardizzone. I must also thank a number of others who have helped in the preparation of this article, especially Mr Martin Bird, who scanned the illustrations, and Mrs Susan Gow, who commented on earlier drafts. I also wish to thank the librarians of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Dublin Public Library; the University Library, Warwick; Birmingham Central Reference Library. These institutions allowed me to study original material, although all images are reproduced from my own (subsequently purchased) copies of Le Fanu’s works.

Like many writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Le Fanu was fascinated by the expressive possibilities of the visual. Widely read and steeped in the traditions of British, Dutch, and Italian art, his interest in the pictorial pervades his fictions, and takes many forms. He repeatedly alludes to painters, paintings, etchings, engravings, and the visual effects of the Old Masters, and several of his most interesting characters are artists.^[i] His descriptive style, moreover, is intensely pictorial. He routinely makes use of the conventions of what at the time of writing was classified as ‘word-painting’ or ‘painting in words’, and his stories, like those of contemporaries such as Dickens and Eliot, make a direct appeal to the reader’s mind’s eye.^[ii] Such visuality is a key characteristic, and has been noted by critics such as Robin Wilkinson, Kel Roop, and Jolanta Nalecz-Wotjtcak. Yet commentaries on Le Fanu’s pictorialism are limited in scope, and present only one part of the equation. Having shown how Le Fanu responds to the visual, criticism has failed to explore in any detail how his texts are themselves the subject of visual interpretation. Some analysis has been made of cinematic treatments, and of representations on the television, but other visual forms remain unexplored.  Most striking is the lack of any sustained analysis of the rich field of illustration. At the time of writing, scholarship on the graphic representation of Le Fanu is limited to scattered (and sometimes inaccurate) comments, and (in contrast to the extensive scholarship on other visualized texts, such as those by Dickens and Thackeray), there is little analysis of how this writer is shown.

Such critical neglect is in one sense rather surprising. As Wilkinson remarks, Le Fanu’s stories were ‘frequently illustrated’ (278), and any scholar of first (or special) editions must necessarily encounter a range of composite texts. Yet it is also true that analysis of the illustrations is hampered by a number of obstacles.  Foremost among these is the problem of inaccessibility: locked away in rare editions or little-known periodicals such as Belgravia or Dark Blue, it is not easy to see the images in their original state. Reproductions do appear—most notably in Michael Cox’s The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu (1988) and Bleiler’s Best Ghost Stories (1964)—but illustrations to Le Fanu are not available in the way that, say, Dickens’s visualized texts can be viewed. Denied access to some of the rarer texts, scholars have not always been able to establish patterns or make detailed readings. Another problem is the heterogeneous nature of the artistic response, there being no stable or continuing treatments such as those developed in the working partnerships of Dickens and Phiz, Trollope and Millais or Eliot and Leighton. In the twentieth century, of course, this relationship is necessarily one-sided—since Le Fanu could not have influenced the process of picturing—but even in his own time he seems to have had little input into the process of collaboration, allowing his publishers to organize the illustrations and the artists to interpret in any style or manner as they saw fit. Such instability acts, once again, to problematize the process of interpretation. Indeed, illustrative treatments of the fictions of Le Fanu have generally resisted categorization, making any assessment of their value a complicated task. The lack of sustained investigation is nevertheless an oversight; the visual response does not deserve its neglect and is worth examining, I suggest, for a number of reasons.

Viewed purely as designs, the illustrations present an impressive gallery of graphic compositions by a number of outstanding artists. Foremost among these is Hablot Knight Browne, better known as Phiz (1840s); Friston (1870s); and the artist’s own son, Brinsley Sheridan Le Fanu, in the fin de siècle. The author has also been the subject of inventive visualization in the twentieth century, with distinguished images being offered, among others, by Edward Ardizzone (1929) and William Stewart (1988). Each of these offers a distinct visual style: Phiz’s scratchy grotesques visualize The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O‘Brien (1847) and the rare Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851); Friston’s journalistic wood-engravings image ‘Carmilla’ in Dark Blue (1872); Ardizzone offers a distinctly modernist showing of the nightmares of In a Glass Darkly; while Stewart visualizes the architecture, settings and cold spaces of Uncle Silas. The tradition is further enriched and brought up to date by the lurid art-work of Douglas Walters, whose readings of Mr Justice Harbottle (2005), Schalken the Painter (2002) and The Haunted Baronet (2003) are models of Gothic moodiness.

More important, however, is the complicated and challenging way in which the artists make sense of their stories. Indeed, illustration to Le Fanu is primarily worth considering because it provides a series of telling representations, essentially modes of visual enquiry designed to help the reader/viewer to interpret the author’s fictional world. Viewed as a body of work that engages with the most problematic material, Le Fanu’s illustration constitutes a continuing tradition of visual reading which constantly explains and expands our understanding of his writing by underlining key aspects of the work, emphasizing its essential characteristics or (most interestingly of all) discovering or re-discovering what was latent or submerged in the text, misunderstood, or simply implied. Used to clarify and explain, the images reinforce and elucidate while adding new dimensions, new emphases and expressive possibilities.

This introductory essay sets out to open new critical ground by exploring some of the ways in which Le Fanu’s illustrations enrich the reader/viewer’s experience of the texts. Treating the images as an interpretive tool intended only to facilitate the process of reading, I focus on the dual process of illustration and interpretation. I lay particular emphasis on the artists’ sometimes surprising mediation of extremely difficult writing that appears to defy visualization, or stretches the expectations of the medium and the readership. Viewing the work as part of a broad tradition serving both Victorian and modern audiences, I analyse the designs within a series of historical contexts.

Le Fanu and Victorian Illustration

The works of Le Fanu were originally published during the years 1838-73, when the illustration of imaginative literature was commonplace. Inaugurated by Dickens in the thirties, the tradition of visualizing texts was an established part of literary culture. During this period the large middle-class audience demanded composite texts of words and engravings, and the experience of engaging with a work of fiction was redefined as a complex decoding of image and word that compelled the reader to become a viewer as well. This emphasis on the partnership of text and illustration provides the cultural setting in which Le Fanu’s earliest fictions were produced. His place in this tradition is in part conventional, and in part anomalous.

       Le Fanu’s position in this milieu was initially unsure. His earliest works in The Dublin University Magazine were not illustrated, as the periodical did not have engravings, and it was not until the forties that he began to participate in what might be called the ‘culture of the visualized word.’ Nevertheless, he was well aware of the conventions of illustrated novels, especially those appearing in the form of the illustrated serial. As a publisher and reader of fictions he must have noted the ubiquitous nature of the visual text as it developed in the thirties and forties, and almost certainly scrutinized the visualized novels of Dickens and Thackeray as they appeared in monthly parts or in periodicals such as Bentley’s Miscellany. Indeed, in several of his texts he reveals a critical interest in the effects of picturing. In Uncle Silas, for example, he implicitly praises the vividness of  Phiz’s ‘charming’ illustrations for Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. Such images help to fix the reader’s idea of the text, so Le Fanu suggests, stressing his point by likening Dudley’s pose to comic effects of Phiz’s ‘burlesque’ (250) designs. Illustration’s capacity to crystallize and focus a literary texts is also noted in Checkmate, where he comments on the visceral power of the ‘startling woodcuts’ (59) accompanying a serialization in a cheap magazine.

Such ‘startling’ images seem to have impressed the author, and he may have allowed his fictions to be embellished because he wanted to exploit the power of the visual. As an ambitious writer and publisher, he must have realized how images helped the reader/viewer to interpret, heightening the reading experience. At the very least—there being no documentary evidence of a desire to be illustrated—he acceded to the conventions of pictorialism, allowing his fictions to be visualized in accordance with prevailing taste. Though he came to illustration a little later than some of his contemporaries, his fictions might thus be contextualized within the wider traditions of mid-Victorian publishing, enabling them to be placed in a framework of visualized writing that connects (on the one hand) with the ‘mainstream’ fictions of Dickens and Thackeray and (on the other) with the illustrated fictions of Sensationalists and purveyors of the Gothic such as Collins, Braddon and Reade. The illustrations serving the work of these Sensational writers of the 1860s bears close comparison with the images for Le Fanu, and it is meaningful to bracket the visual responses to his work with those offered to his fellow practitioners.

Yet Le Fanu’s approach to the collaborative aspect of illustration radically differed from his contemporaries’. Dickens and Thackeray exercised a close control over their artistic partners, and the same is true of Braddon, Collins, and especially Reade; Le Fanu, by contrast, seems to have had absolutely no interest in the process of collaboration. As noted above, he allowed his artists to work independently, and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever directed, guided, or even met any of them. This situation is curious: it is not possible to say with any certainty why his relationship with the illustrator is so completely undeveloped, and it seems paradoxical for a man so interested in art to be so uninterested in working with artists. Part of this indifference may have been the result of the pressure of work, but he may have allowed his illustrators a free rein because he believed his fiction offered enough pictorial clues for them to respond to the texts without further direction. Visual prompts can certainly be found throughout his fictions. On numerous occasions he encourages his readers to visualize a scene as if it were a painting in a particular style or mode, and the same information could be taken as a sort of implicit direction, enabling an illustrator to picture the material. In Checkmate, for instance, he ‘paints’ portraits of his characters by likening their faces to images by Rembrandt and Lely (297, 127), thus providing a visual scheme for an artist to interpret. In The Wyvern Mystery he similarly specifies how his scenes should appear, comparing one character to a painted figure from Hogarth’s Marriage A-la Mode (67). Speaking more generally, he offers throughout his fictions a series of ekphrastic or ‘static images’ (McCormack 151). The placing of characters, the details of architecture, the backgrounds, the foregrounds, the expressions of faces, gestures, and especially the effects of light are carefully specified as part of the practice of ‘painting in words’.

All of these tableaux provide clear visual information that demands to be re-visualized, as it were, by a process of ‘painting’ in graphic lines. This ‘advice’ was taken up, and Le Fanu’s visual tropes were extensively used by his earliest illustrators. Using his ‘pictures in words’ as the only guidance the author was likely to give, they reproduce the details inscribed in the texts: the pictures within provide a template for the pictures without. Just as Phiz recreated Dickens’s details, and Doyle recreated Thackeray’s, so Le Fanu’s Victorian illustrators laid a heavy stress on literal adherence to the author’s pictorialized world. Working in a period when illustration was expected to mirror the text, his earliest interpreters provide a literal replication of his mise-en-scène, reaffirming the authority of the words. Such ‘doubling’ reinforces textual details and underlines key elements of setting and characterization; it responds to tone and ambience, and it helps the reader to immerse him or herself in the texts’ characteristic ‘feel.’ But the overall result is more than a matter of slavish replication. By re-inscribing the author’s ‘pictures’ in a graphic form, the artists more generally create an effect of intensification in which the author’s images of ‘incredulity and horror’ (‘Green Tea’ IGD 37) are taken from the imaginative world of the mind’s eye and placed in the world of the physical eye. This materializing of text, of making it ‘real’ in the sense that it can be looked at, is a powerful means of heightening, of insisting on the horror of Le Fanu’s world by stressing its visceral physicality. Throughout his fictions, Le Fanu tries to make the intangible ‘visible’ (‘The Familiar’ IGD 45). In closely observing his details, his earliest illustrators are able to serve his purpose by stressing the ‘visibility’ of his nightmare world of the strange and supernatural.

This process of showing, of foregrounding the physical reality of horror, is typified by the work of several of his lesser-known illustrators. C. O. Murray (1842-1924) exemplifies the heightening of the material in his design for ‘The Dead Sexton’ (Once a Week, 1871). Murray intensifies the moment of finding Crooke’s body by materializing the author’s commonplace details. The ‘worn ladder’ is journalistically represented, and so is the ‘cold, dead face,’ blankly corpse-like, ‘enew to scare Satan’ (BGS 385-6). The tangled ropes suggest the trajectory of his fall, and the overall effect is completed by the men’s recoiling in physical repulsion as the Vicar reaches out to touch the body (‘The Dead Sexton’, BGS facing 387).³ Visceral horror likewise informs an illustration by J. Abbott Pasquier (fl.1851-72) for ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (Belgravia, 1870). Pasquier depicts the terrible experience of seeing something ‘like a hand’ (BGS 100) rising from the water (BGS fp.100). Le Fanu’s description is imposing enough, but the artist stresses the material intensity of the encounter by showing it in very specific, physical terms, as a delicate white form outlined against turbulent water and the thrashing, angular prow of the boat. Both images act as a mode of embodiment, giving Le Fanu’s situations a precision and specificity, focusing the reader/viewer’s appreciation of the texts by placing them in the concrete world.

The process of material showing similarly informs a series of earlier designs by Phiz (1815-82). In his work for the Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), for which he also designed a binding, the artist eliminates any sense of the haunted as a matter of uncertainty: the settings are prosaically ‘real’ and the apparitions menacingly converted into flesh and blood. Responding to the author’s concrete details, Phiz underlines the corporeal nature of the author’s supernaturalism, making it ever more unsettling. His materialization of Le Fanu’s style is developed at more length, however, in his images for the neglected historical novel, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847). In O’Brien the artist draws out the horror of the author’s tableaux by offering a replication of carefully specified details. A good example is provided by the moment when ‘The Black Guest of Drumgunniol’ appears. Le Fanu described this as a ‘spectacle’ (114) in which

Through the bars of a window…were thrust the knees and head of a figure, whose escape had been rendered impracticable by two transverse bars. . . . The head, and one arm and shoulder, as well as one knee, were thrust through the iron stanchions, and all black and shrunk, the clothes burned entirely away, and the body roasted and shrivelled to a horrible tenuity; the lips dried up and drawn, so that the white teeth grinned and glittered in hideous mockery . . . (114).

‘Appalling’ (114) in itself, Phiz re-visualizes the scene as a piece of black humour in which the ugliness of the situation is given an ungainly physical register (fig.1). The ‘shrunk’ body is shown as a dangling corpse, its knee awkwardly stuck through the bars; the face—described by Le Fanu as the face of a ‘grinning ape’—is made into a burnt skull, while the eyes and teeth peer out at Tisdal in a charnel-house version of ‘hideous mockery’. The artist also registers the horrors of the ‘reeking ruin’, creating a close correspondence between the adjectives ‘hideous’ and ‘horrible’, and the restless, tumbling composition that seems to spill into the viewer’s space. Coarse, dynamic and visually imposing, Phiz’s illustration leaves no doubt as to the physical impact of Tisdal’s experience; forced to contemplate a ‘real’ scene, the viewer is immersed in a ‘shuddering’ (114) contemplation of the unambiguous facts of a terrible death.  Phiz thus provides a careful underlining of his source material: following what is described, he nevertheless gives an added twist. The grotesqueries of Le Fanu are well matched and given physical form by the grotesqueries of Phiz; occupying the same sort of imaginative territory as the author, the artist is well-placed to provide a series of visual equivalences, overwhelmingly gruesome pictures of  the text’s mordant ‘reality’.

Yet, as in his response to Dickens, Phiz is careful to preserve a more personal response as well. Having faithfully illustrated O’Brien as if its history were reality, the artist offers visual interpretations as well. These imaginative illustrations privilege key elements, pointing to aspects of the text that are otherwise half-submerged in Le Fanu’s dense textures. Two elements are foregrounded: the emphasis on suffering, and the fascination with confrontation. Phiz explores the interest in psychological and physical torment, visualizing several scenes of violence and grotesque punishments. The most striking representation of physical suffering is the illustration showing the execution of Garvey by strappado. This moment is tersely described as one of agony as the character is

Raised aloft . . . and again, and yet again, was the torture repeated, amid shrieks, that rang still wilder and more piercing every moment; while at each new descent the frightful process of dislocation perceptibly advanced . . . (280).

Already ‘hideous’ (280), the illustrator stresses the moment of anguish by depicting Garvey as a frail figure pulled across a dynamic composition (fig.2). His torment is further visualized by Phiz’s adding of details so that, for example, there is a comic figure in the right foreground who laughs at his suffering, while the spectacle is watched on all sides by nightmarish figures. The overall effect is one of cruel mockery, almost certainly alluding to the ‘Mocking of Christ’ in Renaissance painting; in the words of David Croal Thompson, the illustration is ‘repulsive (and) horrid’, not least because the artist seems to ‘have gloried’ in its production (quoted in Lester, 150).  Other designs privilege the sufferings of the mind as the characters are affronted by fear, despair and anxiety. Highlighting the figures’ facial expressions as they recoil in ‘horror and astonishment’ (208), the illustrations visualize the psychological effects of extreme emotion. Thus, in ‘Mr.Garnett’s (sic) handsome offer refused’ (facing p. 208), Sir Hugh’s face is a visual exemplification of his inner turmoil as he confronts Garrett’s brutality. This focus also characterizes Tisdal’s response to the Guest (fig.1), and Jeremiah’s anguished ‘remorse’ (fp.201) at a moment of crisis.

       The engravings thus provide a graphic representation of types of fearful suffering in which the body and mind are tormented in equal measure. This visual reading uncovers Le Fanu’s interest in the sadistic, and points, more specifically, to his almost schematic writing of types of fear. Phiz’s designs suggest that Le Fanu structures the novel in terms of Radcliffe’s distinction between ‘horror’ and ‘terror.’ As we have seen, the artist depicts several moments of ‘horror’ in which the mind, assaulted by atrocity, is forced to contract. In Radcliffe’s words, the experience of corporeal suffering ‘freezes the soul.’ At the same time, the graphic showing of moments of mental stress are unmistakeably experiences of ‘terror,’ of contemplating some fearful extreme that allows the soul to ‘expand’ (6). Phiz places both events at the heart of his reading and in so doing he re-figures the novel and the ways in which it can be interpreted. Usually dismissed - or at least undervalued - as a routine historical novel, Phiz reveals its central concern with the sorts of fearful experience that are normally associated, through Radcliffe’s theorizing, with Gothic. Dissected under the pressure of Phiz’s etching needle, the novel is re-written, re-classified as a Gothic novel half-concealed within a piece of historical romance.

        His illustrations act, in other words, to re-position O’Brien in the mainstream of Le Fanu’s writing, forging links between the novel and the rest of his fictions while also suggesting a connection between Le Fanu’s grotesqueries and the older Gothicism of Radcliffe. Phiz’s emphasis on confrontations, on the contemplation of some physical or psychological threat, can be viewed more generally as a clever revealing of a key technique. In showing the ‘weighted encounter’ that lies at the heart of Turlogh O’Brien he identifies a characteristic technique of all of Le Fanu’s writing. His findings are taken up by others, there being numerous occasions where later designers have stressed the centrality of confrontation. Pasquier focuses the device in his illustrations for ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (Belgravia, 1870, BGS, fp.112), most notably when the Baronet is confronted by Feltram, and parallel representations of a heated exchange or a strange encounter are explored, among others, in Wagner’s designs for ‘Justice Harbottle’ (Belgravia, 1872, BGS, fp.246), and C. Murray’s illustrations for ‘The Dead Sexton.’ (Once a Week, 1871, BGS, fp.386).

Focusing on a key moment, each of these illustrators represents the interface between the known and the unknown, between the normal and the aberrant Other. Viewed as a body of images, the work of Phiz, Murray, Pasquier and the others offers a visual gloss, a graphic exemplification of the author’s central concerns. Violence, mental suffering, the perverse and the unsettling are brought to the fore, crystallized in a series of resonant images, rooting the experience in the material. The overall effect is one of clarification and enrichment in which the artists offer accessible versions of highly ambiguous material. As with all imaginative illustration, they re-visualize the texts in ways that reveal their possibilities. This function is performed for the modern reader/viewer, but it especially served the interests of the original, Victorian audiences, allowing Le Fanu’s primary consumers to make sense of his unconventional writing. Acting as a mode of mediation, Le Fanu’s contemporary artists provided a visual map, a means of navigating the texts by recasting them in comprehensible terms. Yet contemporary artists frequently struggled with his most outlandish tales and some material seems almost to resist the process of visualization.

One of the most problematic texts, in terms of its confounding of the Victorian audience’s expectations, is ‘Carmilla.’ First published in 1871-2 in Freund’s short-lived journal, The Dark Blue, ‘Carmilla’ is extremely difficult to convert into telling images. Its problems were two-fold. First and foremost, its emphasis on an erotic relationship between two women made it impossible to visualize directly. No Victorian artist of the 1870s could possibly affront the viewing audience by showing the moments when Laura, held in a lesbian embrace, experiences a ‘tumultuous excitement’ like the ‘ardour of a lover’ (BGS 294). Nor is it possible, within the confines of realist aesthetics, to represent Carmilla’s shape-shifting, from ‘sooty-black animal’ (304) to a ‘creature’ or ‘palpitating mass’ (331). Both issues put serious obstacles in the way of the story’s illustrators, David Henry Friston (fl.1853-78: one of the earliest interpreters of Sherlock Holmes) and Michael Fitzgerald (fl.1871-91). Their solutions are ingenious. Prohibited from literal illustration, they negotiate the text’s meanings by offering a series of visual equivalents, picturings of the author’s excesses that are designed to make them palatable to the middle-class readers of The Dark Blue.

Friston tackles the story’s eroticism by displacing it, and by re-casting it in a parallel form. He is not able to visualize Carmilla’s molestation  of Laura, so he suggests her desire for the innocent narrator by showing her reaching out to touch the figure of Bertha (BGS, fp.332, fig.3). Bertha’s encounter with Carmilla is used, in other words, as a proxy for the suppressed exchange between Laura and Carmilla. By showing Bertha in a sexually explicit way, lying on the bed, as Robert Tracy explains, with her ‘breast and nipple . . . plainly visible’ (Barreca 39) he registers what Carmilla does to the heroine without explicitly showing her in a compromising position. Observing the rules of propriety, the artist is able to maintain the daring suggestiveness of the text by approaching it obliquely, objectifying its eroticism by projecting it onto a minor character. This strategy has the advantage of being both explicit and protective of its narrator, though it is interesting to note that several critics (most notably Robert Tracy) have missed the subtlety of Friston’s approach, misidentifying Bertha as Laura and failing to see the need for the artist to avoid alienating the reader/viewer by showing Laura as a ‘fallen woman’. Friston is equally careful in his showing of Carmilla’s oppressive sexual presence. This is partly achieved by modifying details of her appearance: described as ‘slender’ with ‘languid’ (BGS 290) movements, Friston changes her into a conventionalized femme fatale. In the illustration of her looming over Laura’s bed she is no longer slight but heavily built (BGS, fp.304, fig.4), a visual representation of the idea, commonplace at the time, of women’s sexuality always being signalled by the possession of a voluptuous figure. Friston even changes minor details, most noticeably her hair. Laura describes her coiffure in delicate and suggestive terms as ‘fine and soft,’ ‘heavy’ and ‘tumbling’ (290), but the artist shows it as a tight coil wrapped round the back of her head: an emblem of female ensnarement featuring  throughout Victorian paintings of the malign femme, and probably originating in Coleridge’s description of Geraldine, the Romantic vamp of Christabel.

The illustrations are thus figured, one might argue, as more traditional inscriptions of sexuality. They also re-align the emphasis on metamorphosis. No attempt is made to suggest shape-shifting, but the artist suggests uncertainties of identity by showing her in two distinct forms—as a predatory femme whose pose implies the bestial (fig.3) and as a voluptuous woman (fig.4). Once again, the artist offers equivalents, representations of Gothic monstrosity that match, but do not recreate, the details in the text. Criticised for inconsistency, the illustrations consistently re-inscribe the tale in terms of a more conventional iconography, avoiding the author’s improprieties by offering a series of familiar tropes. These were intelligible to the original audience and were the only visual language available to the artist. Unable to follow Le Fanu into the domains of explicit sexuality—a restriction imposed by the limitations of visual art and visual propriety—he offers other ways of showing. Of course, it could be argued that the process of conventionalization diminishes the text, reducing its shocking directness. It may have interpreted ‘Carmilla’ for the Victorian audience, but the key questions are this: does Friston undermine the essentials of the story? And does his accommodation of mid-Victorian taste tame the story, and reduce it to formulaic terms? The answers, I would suggest, are negatives. Bearing in mind the need to shock obliquely, the artist still manages to preserve a strong sense of the text’s flavour. The eroticism, though displaced into heterosexual signifiers, is powerfully registered; Carmilla’s heavy physicality—by turns matronly and predatory—is also maintained and manages to convey a strong sense of corporeal menace. Indeed, her dominating figure seems physically to overwhelm the forms of Bertha and Laura, so pointing to another, subtler representation of the text: the emphasis on possession, on taking control of the victims’ minds and bodies. Possession is suggested by Friston’s showing of Carmilla as a dark and lowering shape in the foregrounds of the compositions, and it is further mediated in Fitzgerald’s representation of Carmilla ‘tugging’ (294) on Laura’s dress. Nominally showing the scene of the funeral, at which she undergoes a crisis of fear, this offers a subtle suggestion of her need, like some sort of malign but dependent child, always to have her victims’ attention (BGS, fp.294, fig.5).

It could be argued, in short, that the illustrations for ‘Carmilla’ preserve and reveal many of the key elements in the story. Their variety is itself emblematic of the story, an equivalence to the ambiguous alternatives of Carmilla’s identity, especially her shift between supernatural bestiality (fig.3) and ‘languid, beautiful girl’ (339, fig.4). Unable to face its sensational subjects directly, the artists re-encode it in terms that seem inaccessible—and evasive—to the modern reader, but were still potent for the reader of 1872. Often dismissed as unequal to the task, Friston’s and Fitzgerald’s designs for ‘Carmilla’ are as suggestive and insightful as any of those by Le Fanu’s original illustrators.

But the most sustained and multi-faceted of his artists was his son, Brinsley Sheridan Le Fanu (1854-1925). B. S. Le Fanu re-issued his father’s works, essentially as an act of filial homage, in the mid-1890s. He had several artistic advantages over his predecessors: not only did he have intimate knowledge of his father’s ideas, revealing some of them to early biographers, but he also had the benefit of being able to synthesize and assess the visual approaches of earlier designs. In many ways, Brinsley’s approach is both an interpretation of his father’s work and a tribute to what by the nineties was a distinct tradition of visual reading. He noticeably reaffirms the emphasis on dramatic encounters. This is given an additional twist, focusing on the most terrifying moments when characters are brought face to face with a terrible unknown. In The Watcher (1895), especially, the vignettes introducing each short story focus critical moments such as Douw’s first meeting with Vanderhausen (‘Schalken the Painter,’ 126, fig.5) and the servant’s terrified response to the Stranger in ‘The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh’ (169). Captain Barton’s terrible encounter with The Watcher is similarly shown, and so is Schalken’s with Rose. In all of these designs the interface is clearly shown: dream meets reality and the innocent is forced to contemplate the existence of preternatural evil or supernatural menace. At the same time, he stresses the physical, although this time he puts the emphasis on historical settings. Approaching the works as an archaeologist, he is careful to re-locate his father’s stories in the historical periods in which they are set. In practice, this involves visualizing details of décor, setting, and costume which the author barely mentions. In the illustrations for The Watcher, A Chronicle of Golden Friars (1896) and The Cock and Anchor (1895), the milieu of the eighteenth century is registered in the form of detailed paraphernalia, three cornered hats, waistcoats, and panelled interiors. This has the effect of re-contextualizing the novels, as one critic remarked, in the ‘quaint old world’⁴ of an imagined past, an aspect of the novels interesting to readers of the late Victorian period for whom historical detail was the same as fact. In Brinsley’s readings the historical aspect of the texts is sharply focused, and (as in Phiz’s illustrations) we gain a strong sense of cultural perspective, of the fiction’s placement in a strongly imagined past.

His primary concern, however, is the representation of light. Responding to his father’s emphasis on visual obfuscation, he re-presents the characteristically murky light that appears throughout the tales. ‘Filmy moonlight’ (‘Green Tea,’ IGD 31), ‘soft reflected lights’ (Wylder’s Hand 106), dark figures glittering ‘dimly in the twilight’(‘Schalken,’ BGS 31) and everything ‘shadowy and ill-defined’ (43) is re-visualized in a series of brooding designs. In the illustrations for The Watcher, especially, this showing of the obscure is taken to a nightmarish extreme. Densely printed and limited in scale, Brinsley’s images reaffirm the mysterious atmosphere of the tales, giving material form to a world that is dominated, as Roop remarks, by the ‘the eerie play of candle-flames and moonbeams’ (359).

Looking from text to illustrations, the reader/viewer is caught in a pall of obscurity that overwhelms the eye as surely as it entraps the mind’s eye. The illustrations also stress the importance of chiaroscuro as a metaphor for a wider, metaphysical investigation of the nature of reality. Brinsley intensifies the interrogation of the real by making his figures ever more obscure and ambiguous. In the illustrations for ‘Schalken the Painter’ the artist deepens the menacing uncertainty surrounding Vanderhausen by immersing him in suggestive shadow. The text describes his first appearance to Douw in the manner of Rembrandt, giving details of his ‘dark hair,’ ‘ebony walking stick’ and elderly face, ‘three-score, or thereabouts’. Shrouded in ‘twilight’ that glitters ‘dimly’, little can be ‘ascertained’ (BGS 31). In the illustration (The Watcher, p.126, fig.6), on the other hand, practically nothing can be made out: rather, the artist stresses the ‘profound shadow’ of the ‘obscure’ room, immersing Vanderhausen in an illegible darkness that reduces him to an outline and re-writes his identity as a complete blank. Playfully placing him against a brightly illuminated window—a device missing from the text, and included to show how bright light may be no more revealing than darkness—Brinsley converts him from satanic creature into a figure of existential evil, a thing without a face or any distinguishing feature. His ‘malign’ nature (31) is thus brought to the fore by making him into a genuine unknown—a menacing Other about whom nothing can be known because nothing, practically speaking, can be seen.

The artist applies this process of obfuscation more generally to ‘The Watcher’, and to the ‘Passage in the Secret Life of an Irish Countess’. Even where the author does not specify mysterious illumination, the illustrator provides it in the form of ‘profound shadow’ (BGS 31), so stressing the general significance of the shadowy as a central element in the questioning of appearances. Giving material form to shimmering effects, Brinsley points to his father’s shadow-play, his continuing desire, in the words of Roop, to unsettle the reader/viewer by ‘catching’ light and dark in the ‘shadow box’ (369) of menacing possibilities. Insisting on the texts’ mysteriousness by dissolving their characters in all-pervading gloom, he takes us deep into the troubling terrain of his father’s imagination, caught between the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ eye, that ‘dusky’ domain of ‘ruddy light’ (‘Green Tea,’ IGD 20), where the ‘optic nerves’ (28) are unsettled. Charting the interface of known and unknowable, Brinsley’s illustrations stress the relativism of the texts, making them seem both Gothic and Modern, evocative of a curious past while prefiguring a modernist nightmare of shimmering uncertainties. Of all Victorian illustrations, they are perhaps the closest to the author’s evocation of the ambivalent and threatening.

Speaking more generally, Victorian illustrations to Le Fanu provide a tangible means of negotiating his texts. As we have seen, approaches range from illustration to interpretation, from replication of textual details to bold re-interpretation in which key aspects of the stories are focused, re-focused, modified and enriched. The illustrations materialize the texts, allowing us to experience with a visceral directness the author’s exploration of violence, psychological suffering, sexuality and the uncertainties of reality itself. In all responses, Le Fanu’s demanding prose presents a challenge to the conventions of Victorian illustration, forcing the artists to stretch their art, to find equivalents to the author’s provocative charting of the unknown or the unacceptable.

In so doing the illustrations suggest a number of ways in which Le Fanu’s aberrant psychologies can be read. As we have seen, the conventions of Gothic provide a useful tool. The images also point to a Freudian methodology, the most useful of which is the idea of the Uncanny. By representing strange encounters and hauntings, they underline Le Fanu’s constant doubling, his repetition of situations which, according to a Freudian interpretation, is a sign of repression, a means of negotiating trauma that compels the ‘familiar’ (the ‘homely’ or das Heimliche) to re-emerge in a moment of terror as the ‘unfamiliar’ (‘das Unheimliche). Privileging these scenes of crisis, the illustrations highlight the characters’ anguish as they contemplate ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (Freud 12). The pictures of Laura’s encounters with Carmilla might be read, for example, as a visual insistence on the uncanny effects of seeing what is half-familiar, and half-recognised, from previous experience. Certainly the ‘young lady’ with the ‘fixed’ eyes (BGS 277) who appears to Laura as a child is recognizable as the beauty in Friston’s design (fig.4); indeed, the illustration makes a link between the present and the past, and suggests that Carmilla -  the eternal figure waiting to emerge - has always been present in Laura’s troubled psyche. The same effects can be detected in Brinsley’s Le Fanu’s illustrations for ‘Schalken.’ Bathing Vanderhausen in dense gloom, the artist implies he has been repressed into obscurity, and has only been waiting, as a creature of some unspecified past, to re-enter the characters’ horrified minds.

The illustrations further imply the workings of the uncanny in the way that they themselves are doubles for the text, unsettling the reader/viewer by re-representing sometimes unpalatable information which cannot be evaded but has to be faced in an all too material form. In Freudian terms, they invoke the uncanny by blurring the distinction between the imaginary worlds of the texts and the ‘real’. As Freud explains, ‘the uncanny effect’ is ‘often produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality’ (13). Of course, the illustrations are no more ‘real’ than the texts, but they act, nevertheless, to make them seem more real - a process accentuated, as previous discussion has shown, by the journalistic techniques of Friston and Fitzgerald, and by Phiz’s graphic heightening of key details.

Presented as a double, another representation of what has already been described, the images make Le Fanu’s writing ever more claustrophobic. The characters are haunted by endless returns, and the reader/viewer is haunted, as if experiencing déjà vu,  by the patterned repetitiveness, the mirroring of text, that characterizes the relationship between the writing and the illustrations. Caught between image and letterpress, the reader is forced to contemplate an endless echo of meaning, a showing and re-showing of some inescapable experience that returns, spectre-like, to impose on the eye and the mind’s eye. This is true of the more literal illustrations and equally true, somewhat paradoxically, of the artists’ modification or enhancement of some elements. In all of the illustrations the nightmare recurs, its fearfulness intensified, made ever stranger and menacing, by the workings of some subtle dislocation or change.

A Freudian reading might thus be used to conceptualize the dynamic relationship between the text, its symbolic return in the form of the illustrations, and the reader/viewer’s troubled movement between the two. What always emerges, however, is the nightmarish quality of Le Fanu’s world: its violence, its emphasis on shocks, its encounters with the interface between what is seen and understood. None of the artists shows all of these aspects, but taken as a whole their interpretations do much to facilitate our understandings of the fictions, and must have done more, as a mode of visual reading, for the author’s original audience. Stylistically diverse, they provide visible forms for ‘hazy notions’ (US 3) of anxiety and fear.

Interpreting Le Fanu in the Twentieth Century

Brinsley’s illustrations in the 90s represent the final flowering of Victorian interest in his father’s work. There were no immediate successors to Brinsley’s luxury, art-nouveau editions, and it was not until the 20s that the fictions were interpreted by a ‘modern’ artist. The reasons for this lack of new visualizations are two-fold. Illustrated fiction generally declined in the period from 1900-30, and the absence of visual responses to Le Fanu was part of a wider trend. At the same time, Le Fanu’s reputation was itself in steep decline. Few were interested in his work and his fictions—like those of Wilkie Collins and M.E Braddon—slipped into relative obscurity. Little known in a period when illustration was out of fashion, his prose was inevitably denied any new visual interpretation. However, illustrative responses to Le Fanu were given a fresh impetus in 1923, when M. R. James championed the author in his famous introduction to Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Stories. James’s persuasive comments stimulated new interest and his analysis of the author’s visual style suggested he might be a good subject for illustration. James’s notion appears to have been taken up by publishers seeking to make his texts more accessible, and their response was to commission some artists to visualize afresh. This approach produced a number of new editions of varying quality. Several illustrators stress the shock-tactics of Le Fanu, notably Charles De Marnay whose designs for Madam Crowl’s Ghost (1935) contain dramatic contrasts of black and white (Illustrated Le Fanu  192). Others, such as John Mackay, are more conventional: overwhelmed by the strangeness of In a Glass Darkly (1934), Mackay struggles to find an appropriate visual language (Illustrated Le Fanu 177).

 Far more effective, however, are the series of illustrations provided by Charles Stewart (1915-1990) for Uncle Silas (executed 1930: published 1988) and Edward Ardizzone (1900-79) for In a Glass Darkly (1929). Both of these series are interpretations, rather than straightforward illustrations: approaching their material from a distinctly ‘modern’ perspective, they read Le Fanu in the light of what were then current understandings of Gothic, focusing particularly on psychoanalysis, dream-imagery, sexuality and the uncanny. Diminishing narrative detail, Stewart and Ardizzone concentrate on the visualization of Le Fanu’s interior world of anxiety and neurosis: more than any other illustrators, they make fear their centre-piece, the condition they most want to reveal and materialize. Their illustrations are in this sense intensely subjective and interiorized, showing the fictions, as it were, from inside the characters’ fearful perceptions. Informed with a popular understanding of Freud and Jung, they highlight his capacity, as E. F. Bleiler remarks, to penetrate the ‘hidden recesses of the psyches of his characters . . . mapping out the strange areas’ (BGS, viii) of the tormented mind as it struggles with the dislocations of the uncanny and, more explicitly, the sheer terror of encountering the unknown.

Such single-minded emphasis on the characters’ mental condition represents a new focus which extends the expressive range of earlier illustration. More crucially, these ‘modern’ illustrators have at their disposal a visual language not available to their Victorian forebears. Cleverly exploiting the modernist language of expressive distortion, Stewart and Ardizzone offer interior images in which the mental condition of the characters is visualized externally, in the form of visual manipulations of the apparently ‘real’ world surrounding them. As in modern illustrators’ responses to other Victorian writers such as the Brontës, the material becomes the servant of the interior and how the characters feel is inscribed in the very fabric of the physical world. Using modernist techniques, the illustrators therein arrive at a visual solution that is curiously apt as an interpretation of Le Fanu, allowing their picturing to give expression to the author’s Swedenborgian notion of the world as a ‘habitation of symbols’ in which ‘spiritual things’ are shown in ‘material shape’ (US 424) and the physical becomes the transcript of the interior and subjective. This visual ‘correspondence’ between the distortions of plastic forms and mental conditions takes several forms. In Stewart’s Uncle Silas, this process of emotional inscription is realized by writing Maude’s state of mind into the architecture, décor and space, each of which becomes a visible sign. Developing details in the text, and sometimes adding some of his own, Stewart stresses the self-reflectivity of her world, insisting we see her surroundings through the perspective of her psyche.

Special emphasis is placed on décor: heightening the text’s apparently prosaic details, Stewart makes Maude’s obsessive noting of objects a measure of psychological dislocation. The relationship between her specificity and her anxiety is epitomized in the illustration of her initial meeting with Silas. What she notices first are the details of the ‘small table’ and ‘four wax lights in tall silver candlesticks’ (174)⁵ all details that Stewart endows with preternatural distinctness (fig.7). Every detail in the room is shown with Pre-Raphaelite precision and acts, I suggest, to imply the heightened perceptions arising as a result of what she openly describes as her ‘fearful’ (174) contemplation of her uncle. This painful intensity characterizes all of the illustrations, making a distinct visual link between the character’s neurotic nervousness and the nightmarish specificity of her surroundings.

Space, likewise, becomes an emblematic, expressive register of her sense of mental change and disintegration. Stewart focuses on the movement from enclosure to openness, from order to visual disorder. When Maude feels secure, in the company of her father, Stewart compresses the space, ignoring the textual detail of the room’s length and showing Maude in the womb-like comfort of an enclosing chair (fp.2). This security in the ‘deep recess’ (85) is later disrupted when Madame de la Rougierre intrudes in search of her father’s papers. In a brilliant illustration (fig.8), the artist represents the governess framed in the doorway, surrounded by maze-like plaster patterns. These details do not feature in the text, and by including them he foregrounds the idea of Maude’s small world, itself a self-enclosing maze, being disrupted, literally broken apart by the intrusion of malign forces, and exposing her, metaphorically speaking, to dangerous spaces. Indeed, Maude’s sense of growing isolation and loneliness is repeatedly conveyed by illustrations of vertiginous openness combined with an architecture that seems heavy, brutalist and oppressive. At the same time, space and its enclosing décor becomes increasingly cramped and constraining, a visual representation not of Maude’s initial sense of comforting enclosure but of her progressive imprisonment (a note prefigured on the title-page by showing her in a suspended bird-cage.) Throughout the later illustrations, the characters’ movements are contained within geometrical frames such as windows, doorways and coffered panels. The metaphorical significance of the architecture is most clearly shown when the narrator seizes the window-pane in a desperate attempt to speak to Lady Knollys: a powerful design which shows Maude‘s, the maid’s and de la Rougierre’s fluid forms within a rigid frame of verticals and horizontals, the very embodiment of the narrator’s sense of rising panic (fp.351).

What Stewart does, in short, is foreground Maude’s fearfulness by making her world ever more oppressive, cramping her body and mind in limiting spaces of cloying details, imprisoning patterns and shapes. The harsh geometry becomes the embodiment, the visual showing of the writer’s subtle charting of inner change as Maude moves from relative normality to panic, neurosis and outright terror. Produced by an artist more famous for his costume illustrations than his responses to literature, Stewart’s designs for Uncle Silas stress the material oppressiveness of Le Fanu’s writing, showing a fictional  universe  positioned in the interface between perception and emotion, the outer world and its inner construction by the mind. In his plate-like designs, he finds a highly formalized language to express the unsettling of Maude’s psyche as surely as the author reveals it in subtle details and unfamiliar places. The resonance of his illustrations is measured, moreover, by the contrast between the designs in the body of the text and the Gothic excesses of the pictorial frontispiece, which shows a Phiz-like composition of fluttering demons and Gothic cemeteries. This, Stewart seems to suggest, is how it might have been illustrated in Le Fanu’s own time—a way of illustrating he roundly contradicts in his geometrical constructions of fear.

Stewart inscribes a mental condition in the novel’s architecture and space, but Edward Ardizzone’s illustrations for In a Glass Darkly operate on a more intimate register. Conceived as a series of scratchy, apparently art-less sketches—an effect appropriately recalling the haunted immediacy of automatic writing—Ardizzone’s illustrations explore the aberrant and fearful by distorting the characters’ faces, gestures and bodies. Better known as an illustrator of children’s books in which he humorously distorts the figures of the young, he offers a sensitive response to the nuances of Le Fanu’s descriptions, converting his ‘portraits’ of face and form into plastic units that express the characters’ innermost fears. Mental condition is written in increasingly malleable forms so that what we see is an often terrifying externalization of subjective terrors. This is very much an Expressionistic approach to the problem of representation, but more remarkable is the artist’s capacity to manipulate his distortions, using them to express the varying focus of the characters’ situations and personalities.

In ‘Green Tea’ he charts Jennings’s mental disintegration by focusing on the changes in his gestures and demeanour. The notion of Jennings’s repression of his inner life—perhaps the cause of his deadly hallucinations—is highlighted by making his body excessively stiff, upright and constrained. Le Fanu describes him almost as a geometrical abstraction, a ‘tall’ (5)⁶ shape configured like a closed book, and the same stiffness is carried to an extreme in the illustrations. In Ardizzone’s designs the sense of inner tension and containment is manifested in his stick-like immobility: his gestures are static and his movements stilted. As soon as the spectral monkey appears, however, his terror is registered in the movement from immobility to extreme, almost melodramatic gesturing. Most powerful are the images of recoil, each of which is Ardizzone’s invention and is not mentioned in the text. When the creature appears in front of the fire, the figure’s terror is mapped in its enlarged, upraised hands, open stance and horrified gaze (29). His intensifying torment is then registered in a series of illustrations which show him with upraised hands, clutching his face (31, 32, 36). However, the whole series is crystallized in the story’s title-page (1, fig.9). This shows him as an angular mesh of elongated hands and hook-like nose, pulling away from the monkey in a jagged movement. Fractured and restless, the drawing exemplifies his inner agitation. Ardizzone also finds a formal equivalent to represent his character’s despair.  In the final illustration he depicts Jennings as a figure lying down with an arm hanging loosely by his side: a detail, again, that does not appear in the text but aptly conveys subversion of his mind, converting his stiff self-containment into an image of helpless mortality and hopelessness. Significant gesturing similarly plays a part in visualizing the agonies of Captain Barton as he tries to escape the malign persecutor of ‘The Familiar.’ The main emphasis, however, is on his isolation; showing his body as a vulnerable form in an unfamiliar urban setting, Ardizzone stresses Barton’s mental frailty. Afraid of sound—of footsteps approaching, of the watcher’s malign whispers—his body shrinks back into itself (55, 58) as if to escape the onslaught of a terrifying unknown.  The effect of disorientation is heightened by distortions of the setting (55, fig.10) placing Barton’s malleable form in a series of geometrical spaces which stress the ugliness of Le Fanu’s descriptions of an apparently semi-derelict Dublin, ‘full of rubbish (and) extended waste-fields’(68).

Parallel distortions of figure and form can be traced in ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ and ‘The Room at the Dragon Volant’, but Ardizzone’s most powerful designs are reserved for ‘Carmilla.’ The artist visualizes the terrors of this story not by showing its impact on Laura’s body, but by stressing Carmilla’s monstrosity. In contrast to Le Fanu’s Victorian illustrators, Ardizzone is able to use modernist distortions to suggest the horrors of his subject in the fabric of her changeable appearance. He explicitly represents Carmilla’s sexual possessiveness by illustrating several moments when she embraces Laura, or moves into an inappropriate proximity (308, 314) In contrast to Jennings’s withdrawn body, or Barton’s attenuated frailty, Carmilla’s body constantly opens and seems to enclose Laura’s. Her malign intentions are vividly expressed in the moment when she engages Laura in an erotic embrace. Described by Laura as a moment of ‘fear and disgust’ (318), the image suggests Carmilla’s capacity to absorb her victims by literally showing her as the dominant figure, overwhelming the body of her victim. This emphasis highlights Carmilla’s predatory nature, and the artist completes his visualizing of her inner shape by depicting several moments, most notably in the story’s pictorial title, when she transforms into the black creature, something like a cat but ambiguous enough to suggest other possibilities (291, fig.11). In contrast to Friston’s design, Ardizzone’s represents her as a shape-shifter, a creature of indeterminate physical identity whose inner life is identified as bestial.

Ardizzone’s showing of the changeability of Carmilla’s body exemplifies his visual technique. Throughout his illustrations he distorts in order to externalize, to open the ‘inner eye’ as surely as Jennings’s perceptions are opened, and to reveal outwardly the inner truth; in the artist’s own terms, which he applied to his work for an edition of Shakespeare, he did not seek to illustrate the text literally, but to offer a ‘visual analogy’ (Hodnett 242), a material form designed to the characters’ mental sufferings.  The overall effect is one of intense visualization in which the reader/viewer’s appreciation of the characters’ fearfulness and horror is powerfully conveyed. This effect is supported, as I suggested above, by the ‘automatic’ nature of the drawings. Arising, it seems, from the author’s frightening world of dreams, Ardizzone’s demented illustrations are full of horrifying surprises, not least when an inadvertent turning of the page reveals hanging figures (130, 143) a grotesque spectral monkey with a serpentine elongated tail (1, fig.9) and (most telling of all) the figure of Carmilla, her form distorted into a pictogram of terror, being axed to death (374). Preserving the author’s horrific uncertainties as surely as he maps the characters’ mental collapse into terror, Ardizzone offers what is perhaps the most telling of any illustrations to Le Fanu. The artist certainly regarded his work for Le Fanu as his best; in the words of Brian Alderson, he provides a ‘remarkable blend of freedom and precision (offering sketches which are) exactly keyed to the spirit of the author’s words and the book’s character’ (6). Interestingly, his work for In a Glass Darkly was his first commission, although he never had the opportunity to develop his gift for representing Gothic extremes.

Nevertheless, Ardizzone’s images continue the tradition of earlier designs, combining illustration with interpretation, fidelity to the text with imaginative discovery of unexpected layers of meaning or novel emphases. More particularly, he uncovers or constructs a ‘new’ Le Fanu, recasting him as a ‘modern’ writer of sexuality and psychology while also registering his ’older’ concerns as a practitioner of raw-edged Gothic who sets out to unsettle his reader with images of horrific excess, violence and mental torment. Without doubt, Ardizzone plays an important part in reviving Le Fanu’s reputation in the twentieth century and his version of In a Glass Darkly is rightly regarded by critics as one of the outstanding modern responses to a Victorian author.

A Continuing Tradition

Le Fanu continues to be illustrated. Geoffrey Bourne-Taylor provides startling designs, a sort of horrifying version of Aubrey Beardsley, in his illustrations for The Hours After Midnight (1975). More recently, Douglas Walters has offered mannered but imposing images for The Haunted Baronet (2002), Mr Justice Harbottle (2005), Schalken the Painter (2002), and Spalatro (2001).

All of these series contribute to the ‘after-life’ of the texts, enabling them to be read and re-read, visualized and re-visualized in ways that are ever changing. Like all outstanding Victorian writers, Le Fanu resists classification in terms of a single style or interpretive approach, and the complex responses he continues to provoke are an indication, at the very least, of the richness of his texts. No one artist can ever encompass all of his complexities and it is interesting to note how critics have struggled to suggest who might have been the ‘ideal’ artist to illustrate a work—a list that ranges from James’s suggestion of Bewick or Doré (6), to Elizabeth Bowen’s idea of an equivalence between Le Fanu and the British Neo-Romantic, John Piper (14). This is just speculation but what we do have in the illustrative response to his work is an impressive body of images, a visual guide to help the reader/viewer make sense of Le Fanu’s provocative world. Not as developed as the composite texts of Dickens or Trollope, Le Fanu’s illustrated fictions are still a valuable asset, a means of reading which greatly enhances and extends the author’s imaginative impact.

Possessed by the horrors of his texts, his illustrations are indeed haunted images, revenants endlessly returning to inhabit and pervade the reader/viewer’s eyes. Like all outstanding designs, they colour our perceptions of how Le Fanu should be read. They open the outer eye, matching what we see with our more internalized perceptions of the texts. Having opened the eye, whether it be inner or outer, it is difficult, as Dr. Hesselius finds out, to close it again.

Notes