Seeking to “justify the claim for (virtually) the whole body of Le Fanu’s work that Patricia Coughlan has made for his ghost stories: that it exhibits ‘a unity of purpose and meaning’ and frames ‘important questions about the concept of the self and the constitution of what is called reality’”, this ambitious academic study carefully places Le Fanu within the larger context of European fiction, particularly the work of the German Romantics, the Gothic novelists, the novel of Sensibility, the work of Honoré de Balzac, and other “literary antecedents in a series of imaginative encounters with the void that were part of an Anglo-Irish writer’s wider literary milieu.” By revealing that Le Fanu’s work appeared in the Dublin University Magazine preceded by and alongside translations of weird fiction from the French and German, as well as articles and reviews devoted to the German Romantics, Mesmerism, and a variety of occult and outré subjects, Walton lends greater resonance to this author’s fiction while following “the course of Le Fanu’s attraction to the void, and his resistance to it, from the beginning to the end of his career.”

Walton’s study describes not a provincial writer producing potboilers for a foreign market, but a conscious artist aware of the precarious ethical and social position of the Protestant Ascendancy of which he was a part, sympathetic to the post-Enlightenment crisis of faith afflicting every thinking man and woman of his age, and capable of transmuting elements from a variety of different fictional modes in order to express these concerns in works reflecting the characteristically uneasy juxtaposition between life and art, mirror and object, light and shade, the living and the dead, the past and the present.

Particularly valuable is Walton’s insistence upon the protean nature of Le Fanu’s approach to matters of the natural and the supernatural, waking and dreaming. Unlike those interpreters who dismiss the paradoxes in this author’s work as signs of haste and imperfect craftsmanship, then insist upon limited interpretations based upon allegory, psychoanalysis, and other convenient pigeonholes, Walton invites a variety of interpretations via the number of sources and possible influences he cites. For instance, his tracing of common elements between the plot of Willing to Die and the Immalee chapters of Melmoth the Wanderer works with his concurrent linking of the novel to common elements in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette to broaden rather than limit the novel’s scope and the reader’s appreciation for its depth.  Even when he urges an interpretation of “Schalken the Painter” as a Kunstlermärchen with an Oedipal subtext in the course of analyzing it alongside Hoffmann’s “The Sand-Man” and Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece”, Walton’s allusions to Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot”, Victor Sage’s and Kel Roop’s studies of frame and chiaroscuro, Ann Radcliffe, and the aesthetics of Edmund Burke among other subjects makes it clear that the tale possesses a much wider frame of reference than can be satisfied with this interpretation alone.

Where this approach proves most refreshing, at least for this reader, was in Walton’s approach to “Green Tea”. By quoting from articles published by the Dublin University Magazine and even De Quincey’s famous Confessions, providing a detailed delineation of the societal and familial crises that led first to the composition of “The Mysterious Stranger” and then to “Green Tea”, including a discussion of the “century’s spiritual itinerary” as reflected in Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” and “Work Without Hope”, Carlyle’s “Characteristics” and the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, Walton is capable of offering a few cogent interpretative remarks of his own before celebrating the profundity of this tale: “The nested narratives and the nests of interpretations presented by ‘Green Tea’ reflect precisely the fractured version of reality that affronted the ‘best minds’ of Huxley’s generations.” Through careful attention to the text and exceptional care in relating the work to the currents and temper of its age, Walton demonstrates that it is a mark of Le Fanu’s triumph, not a sign of faulty craftsmanship that this “story offers too many explanations of Jennings’s plight.”

If the book can be faulted, it must be admitted that on occasion the verve with which Walton summons his phalanxes of allusions and reflections results in passages that  clutter and obscure his line of reasoning rather than clarify them. At such points, the reader must stop, separate recognizable or quoted allusions from those not recognized, perhaps investigate this new reference to Hume or Locke, cogitate over how this new information fits into what has preceded it, then continue reading. This is not precisely a complaint, because every such juncture leads to new insights; however it does make portions of the book rather slow going. Walton challenges his reader to discard prior preconceptions of Le Fanu as merely a writer of regional fiction and verse, sensation novels, or supernatural tales; and view him as an artist in a broader, richer, and greater European tradition.  In a study as thought-provoking as this one, episodes of temporary confusion, remedied by a moment’s reflection or a little outside study, are a small price to pay.