A TALE TOLD AGAIN: LE FANU’S “THE EVIL GUEST” AND A LOST NAME

By Gary William Crawford

(ISSN 1932-9598)

            It is well-known that Le Fanu frequently rewrote some of his stories.  The early tale, “The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” was later developed into the longer novella “The Haunted Baronet.”  The short story “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess” was reprinted as “The Murdered Cousin” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery and expanded as the novel Uncle Silas.  “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” was rewritten as the novel The Wyvern Mystery, and the long story “Some Account of the Latter Days of Richard Marston, of Dunoran,” was reprinted as “The Evil Guest” in Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery and reworked into the novel A Lost Name.  It is these last two works that I discuss in this essay.

            Of the novel A Lost Name, critic V.S. Pritchett wrote that it is a short story “that has unhappily got itself into a family way” (108).  Le Fanu’s powers in writing novels were declining in these years, but he defended it in a letter to his publisher, Richard Bentley. He said to Bentley that he thought “on the whole ‘a lost name’ is much the best thing I ever wrote" (qtd. in Edens 144). “Some Account of the Latter Days of Richard Marston, of Dunoran” was serialized over three installments in The Dublin University Magazine from April to June 1848.  It was reprinted as “The Evil Guest” in Le Fanu’s anonymous collection Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery in 1851.  The rewritten novel was serialized in Temple Bar as A Lost Name.  As Walter Edens remarks, “A Lost Name was generally ill-made and incoherent for the whole year of its appearance in Temple Bar.  It began as the lead story but drifted to the back pages of Temple Bar and spent its last months in obscurity” (143). 

Audrey Peterson says that in the earlier form,“The Evil Guest,” “Le Fanu’s chief purpose in the story was the exposure of the evil wrought by the squire and that the murder is an example of his moral degradation rather than a puzzle set forth for the reader to solve” (126).  The major concern of both versions is the inevitability of fate.  The idea of fate arises from the goddesses of Greek mythology, the Fates, who determined the future of mortals;  but it was Le Fanu’s belief in the ultimate power of God that qualifies his view of fate, and religion figures in both versions of the tale.  Instead of a detective who solves the puzzle, it is fate that provides the truth, and this truth is set in terms of divine providence.  This unification of Greek thought and Christianity stems from the writing of Boethius (d. 524) in his work of poetry and prose The Consolation of Philosophy.  In this work, the writings of Aristotle and Plato meet Christianty in which the Pagan idea of Fate is recast in terms of Divine Providence.

            I will here compare and contrast the two versions of Le Fanu’s story from this notion of fate and show that “The Evil Guest” is superior to the novel version A Lost Name.  I conclude with the assertion that Le Fanu was better at the shorter forms such as the novella and the short story rather than the novel.

            Turning first to “The Evil Guest,” it is written in a third person omniscient point of view.  The primary setting is the country house, Gray Forest, owned by Richard Marston, who lives there with his invalid wife, Gertrude, and their daughter Rhoda.  Marston has a son, Charles, who is at Cambridge during most of the narrative.  There is a French governess, Madamoiselle de Barras, who is often described in terms of her beauty.

Early in the novella, Marston is expecting his cousin, Sir Wynston Berkley to pay him a lengthy visit.  Marston’s fortunes are declining, while Sir Wynston is very wealthy. Marston holds Sir Wynston in a certain amount of antipathy, and this is a source of much internal conflict for Marston.  Over a few days, this builds in Marston until suddenly in a rage, he stabs Sir Wynston to death late one night while the household sleeps.  Unknown to Marston, the governess Madamoiselle de Barras, knows what Marston did, and she blackmails him.

Another character, one of Marston’s servants, Merton, appears in Sir Wynston’s room with the intention of stealing his money.  He discovers that Sir Wynston has been murdered, and Sir Wynston’s servant discovers Merton in the room.  Merton leaves Lake Forest and disappears for several weeks, knowing that he will be wrongly accused of the murder.  In the weeks prior, Merton had been acting very strangely, which was noticed by the other servants, and he calls on God in their presence.  Merton returns to Lake Forest to give himself up and he is sent to prison.  While in prison, Merton tells the local vicar, Dr. Danvers, about what happened.  Danvers keeps the secret until Marston, whose mind gradually becomes unhinged, kills himself.

Thus it is fate that reveals the solution to the mystery.  One senses the ultimate power of God in resolving the tragic histories of these characters.  This very same thing brings about the solution to the mystery in the novel form of the tale, A Lost Name.  Basically the same events occur as in “The Evil Guest” with some slight modifications. The names are changed and there are some minor characters who add little of any importance to the main plot.  The novel is written in the third person, but very occasionally, the narrator speaks in the first person and regards the characters as people he knew.

One character who is the counterpart of the innocent and unjustly imprisoned Merton in “The Evil Guest” is Carmel Sherlock.  Like Merton, he is very religious.  And like Merton, he begins to become obsessed with some horrible thing that will descend on the family.  Merton approaches Mrs. Marston and tells her that he wants to leave Lake Forest.  The servants notice the change that comes over him.  They see him praying and crying in his room.  Similarly, in A Lost Name, everyone in the house begins to think Carmel Sherlock is mad. His master, Mark Shadwell, has always thought Sherlock is mad, but he knows well how adept Sherlock is at maintaining his books.  In Sherlock, the reader can see a sense of spiritual urgency concerning the Shadwell family.  Sherlock tells Shadwell’s daughter Rachel, that he will soon be leaving the great house at Raby because he fears that some terrible thing will happen.  But he is and always has been very much an eccentric.  He is a religious fanatic who frequently reads the Scripture and whose talk about spirits echoes Austin Ruthyn’s Swedenborgianism in Uncle Silas.  Because he is in the wrong place at the wrong time (in Sir Roke Wycherley’s room after Sir Roke has been murdered), he goes to prison, like Merton, when he is innocent, and, like Merton, he dies there. As in so much of Le Fanu’s work, religion is a prominent factor;  and as in so much of Le Fanu, the corruption of the aristocracy figures.  Carmel Sherlock in a sense is a prophet of this. And it is fate and divine providence that reveals this corruption.

One of the major differences is that in A Lost Name, Mark Shadwell does not lose his sanity before he kills himself.  As in “The Evil Guest,” Shadwell’s invalid wife dies.  And as in “The Evil Guest,” he marries his daughter’s governess, but unlike “The Evil Guest,” his young and beautiful wife is unfaithful to him.  Marston is so affected by this when he discovers it that he ventures out to the forest outside his home on a stormy night and drowns in a pond.  The narrator surmises that his death was a suicide.

            A Lost Name was published in the standard three volume format of Victorian novels, whereas “The Evil Guest” occupies about 150 pages of the collection Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery.  Le Fanu expanded a rather thin plot over a great expanse of language in the novel.  The shorter work is more economical and holds interest, whereas the novel has many tedious chapters in which little happens.  It is not until the end of the first volume that the murder occurs; in the short form, the murder takes place after about twenty pages.

            I contend that Le Fanu’s gift was in the shorter form, whether in the short story or novella.  Such fine novellas as “The Haunted Baronet,” “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” and “Carmilla” come to mind, and the short stories outshine the novels in quality and intensity.  Walter Edens has noted that frequently Le Fanu taxed the ingenuity of Richard Bentley’s typesetters to fill the requisite three volumes.  Even in the longer works, he was not long enough.  Most critics agree that Uncle Silas remains the best of the novels.

            As I have outlined in this essay, I take V.S. Pritchett’s view that Le Fanu wrote a short story that “got into the family way” (108).  Le Fanu, often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, might have done better to take Poe’s advice to writers when he argued for the excellence of brevity in prose.

WORKS CITED

Boethius.  The Consolation of Philosophy.  Trans. and Intro. P.G. Walsh.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2008.

Edens, Walter Eugene.  “Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu:  A Minor Victorian and His Publisher.”  Diss. U of Illinois, 1963.

[Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan].  “The Evil Guest.”  In Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery.  Dublin: James McGlashan, 1851.

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan.  A Lost Name.  3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1868.

Peterson, Audrey.  Victorian Masters of Mystery:  From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle.  New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Pritchett, V.S.  “An Irish Ghost.”  In his The Living Novel and Later Appreciations.  New York: Random House, 1964.