Le Fanu Le Fanu Le Fanu

Recent publications by and about J. Sheridan Le Fanu deserve some attention here. Tartarus Press has just published Some Strange Disturbance: Selected Ghostly Tales, edited by Jim Rockhill, who contributes a twelve page introduction to the selection of thirteen stories by Le Fanu. There is a long tradition of publishing selections of Le Fanu's tales (some of which were originally published anonymously, with posthumous attributions to Le Fanu of varying degrees of certainty), from M.R. James's Madam Crowl's Ghost (1923), through two volumes from Arkham House, Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories (1945) and The Purcell Papers (1975), through two volumes edited by E.F. Bleiler for Dover Books, Best Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu (1964) and Ghost Stories and Mysteries (1975), on to single volume collections like Michael Cox's Illustrated J.S. Le Fanu (1988), Leonard Woolf's Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (1996), and Aaron Worth's volume in the Oxford World Classics series, Green Tea and Other Weird Stories (2020). But the sort-of father to Rockhill's selection is none of these volumes; instead, it is the three volume set Rockhill himself edited about twenty years ago, Schalken the Painter and Other Ghost Stories, 1838–61 (2002); The Haunted Baronet and Others, Ghost Stories 1861-70 (2003); and Mr. Justice Harbottle and Others, Ghost Stories 1870-73 (2005). Rockhill's 2025 selection contains five stories from the first volume, five from the second, and three from the third.

 

In terms of Le Fanu scholarship, Rockhill's lengthy introductions to the three volumes from twenty years ago have long needed to be collected into a volume on their own, and Swan River Press has also just published Rockhill's A Mind Turned in upon Itself, which includes updated versions of the three introductions plus several stray writings by Rockhill, including one on stories mis-attributed to Le Fanu ("The Faux and the Spurious: False Ghosts and Doubtful Le Fanu") and another which discusses "Lovecraft's Response to the Work of Le Fanu." This makes for an essential volume for anyone wanting up-to-date views on Le Fanu.

 

Finally, Swan River Press has also just published The Green Book no. 26 (Samhain 2025) which collects a number of oddities about Le Fanu (including a story by his sister, and extracts from a volume by his brother, as well as a survey of his contemporary obituaries and a discussion of the very faded inscription on the capstone of Le Fanu's grave). Issue 26 is a follow-up to The Green Book no. 25 (Bealtaine 2025) from earlier this year, which is also entirely concerned with Le Fanu.