GAVIN SELERIE’S LE FANU’S GHOST

(ISSN 1932-9598)

Gavin Selerie.  Le Fanu’s Ghost.   Hereford, England:  Five Seasons Press, 2006. ISBN 9780947-960445.  $39.00.  Distributed in the U.S. by www.spdbooks.org and available in Britain from  www.fiveseasonspress.com.

            Ever since S.M. Ellis’s work on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) in his book Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others  romantic legends have circulated in various published sources about the life of “The Invisible Prince,” as he became known in the reclusive years after his wife’s death.  The major problem for most recent critics and biographers is the sensational legend of Le Fanu’s death that Ellis put forth in this piece.  Until the biography of Le Fanu by W.J. McCormack, this story was often repeated in most of the writing on Le Fanu.  In recent years, Jim Rockhill, in his introductions to his edition of Le Fanu’s ghost stories from Ash-Tree Press, and now Gavin Selerie, in his prologue to his poetry collection, have exploded this legend.

            Gavin Selerie’s prologue contains much original research about Le Fanu’s life, the lives of his ancestors and contemporaries and descendents, and is in itself a very fine piece of scholarship.  In discussing Le Fanu’s lineage, he notes how so many of his ancestors and relatives were creative people.  Above all, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the famous eighteenth-century playwright, was the most prominent.  Le Fanu was the grand-nephew of this illustrious man, and Le Fanu inherited the writing table that Sheridan used to write his works.  His daughter Eleanor wrote three novels and his niece Rhoda Broughton was encouraged by Le Fanu and aided in her success as a novelist and short story writer.  His brother William wrote a book of his memoirs, Seventy Years of Irish Life, and his son, Brinsley, was a prominent artist.

            Gavin Selerie’s new collection of poetry, Le Fanu’s Ghost, offers a modernist view of this artistic family that is a tribute to their greatness.   These poems are often written in stichometric forms, echoing Richard Brinsley Sheridan and others, and even bringing into play James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which contains many phrases and passages based on Le Fanu’s work, especially The House by the Churchyard.

Many poems are humorous and horrifying at once.   The poem “Faded Novel: Fine Again” is written in the manner of Finnegans Wake and is both a humorous and horrifying poem about Le Fanu’s famous vampire Carmilla.  “Dreor Grammaticus” is a tribute to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1931 film Vampyr, which is based on Le Fanu’s most famous short story collection In a Glass Darkly.  Selerie also quotes from actual letters by Le Fanu and his family, and these are incorporated into book itself.

Some poems are about writing fiction and poetry, such as “Idiogloss,” which weaves a  poem around Le Fanu’s preface to Uncle Silas, which defends his writing of romances rather than novels.  Other poems spring from Le Fanu’s stories, such as  “Exquisite Corpse” from “The Room in the Dragon Volant.”  Many of the stories are drawn from Le Fanu’s ancestors, such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  There are also quotes from James Joyce’s works and letters.

On the whole, this book presents the rich panorama in the Le Fanu-Sheridan line, with poems that evoke the world in which Le Fanu lived and the world from which he came.  This book is highly recommended for readers, students, and scholars of Le Fanu.