Looking for Sheridan Le Fanu books? Born in Dublin in 1814, Le Fanu was the Irish writer who taught Victorian readers to fear the dark.
His vampire novella Carmilla came out 25 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula, and it helped inspire it. Here you'll find it next to Uncle Silas, In a Glass Darkly and 14 more ghost stories and mystery novels.
Every book is free to read online or download as PDF. If you're new to Le Fanu, start with Carmilla and leave the lamp on.
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Ghost Stories
Sheridan Le Fanu Ghost Stories and Gothic Tales
M. R. James placed Sheridan Le Fanu in the first rank of ghost story writers and modelled his own tales on him. Start with Carmilla and In a Glass Darkly, then move on to the Irish folk ghosts of The Purcell Papers.
A lonely girl in a Styrian castle takes in a beautiful, mysterious guest, and grows weaker as their friendship deepens. Our own Project Aldus edition of the 1872 novella that created the female vampire, twenty-five years before Dracula.
Five cases from the papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, one of the first occult detectives in fiction, including Green Tea, Mr. Justice Harbottle and Carmilla. If you only read one Le Fanu collection, make it this one.
A quiet clergyman starts seeing a small black monkey that no one else can see, and it will not leave him alone. Paired here with Mr. Justice Harbottle, the tale of a cruel hanging judge whose victims come back to try him.
A rich young Englishman in 1815 France falls for a masked countess and agrees to meet her at a sinister inn. Le Fanu's novella keeps you one step ahead of its hero, which makes the trap even harder to watch.
Two short ghost stories in 43 pages. In the first, a young servant girl learns why one room in old Madam Crowl's house stays locked; in the second, a village sexton's death sets something loose on a stormy night.
Eight Irish ghost tales, among them The Watcher, Schalken the Painter and The Ghost and the Bone-Setter. This 1894 edition carries twenty-one illustrations by Brinsley Le Fanu, the author's son.
Le Fanu's earliest stories, told as the papers of an Irish parish priest: folk ghosts, haunted castles and Schalken the Painter, one of his finest tales. All three volumes in one file, with a memoir of the author.
A ruined squire, a dissolute cousin come to visit and a murder in a lonely mansion deep in the woods. This 1851 Gothic novella is the seed of Le Fanu's later mysteries, and it reads in a single evening.
In the 1860s, as editor of the Dublin University Magazine, Sheridan Le Fanu turned to the Sensation novel made famous by Wilkie Collins. Uncle Silas leads this shelf, followed by mysteries full of crime, hidden marriages and stolen inheritances.
Young heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to live with an uncle once suspected of murder, in a decaying house where every kindness hides a threat. Le Fanu's best-known novel and a masterclass in slow Victorian suspense.
Murder, buried secrets and village gossip in Chapelizod, just outside Dublin, in the 1760s. Look for the chapter of the disembodied hand, one of the most famous ghost episodes Le Fanu ever wrote.
Mark Wylder vanishes on the eve of his wedding, and the letters he keeps sending from abroad only deepen the mystery. A tightly plotted Sensation novel that many readers rank next to Uncle Silas.
Alice Maybell, a penniless orphan raised by a rough old squire, marries his son in secret and moves into a house that hides another woman. A Gothic mystery that echoes Jane Eyre with Le Fanu's darker touch.
A wealthy newcomer with a flawless face hides a past tied to an unsolved murder. Le Fanu's 1871 crime novel is one of the first novels to hinge on plastic surgery.
A young stranger arrives at Marlowe Hall with the face of a man killed in a duel years before, and the baronet who fired the shot cannot sleep. Both volumes of the 1865 novel in one file.
Two sisters rent an old house on the Welsh coast and walk into a web of family secrets, a hidden marriage and a dangerous rivalry. All three volumes of the 1867 novel in a single PDF.
Ethel Ware tells the story of her own youth, from a strange childhood to love, debt and betrayal. Le Fanu's last novel, published the year he died, is quieter and more personal than his mysteries.
Le Fanu's first novel, a historical romance of plots, duels and doomed love set in Dublin in 1710. A chance to see where the master of Victorian suspense started.
Le Fanu died in Dublin in 1873, but his shadow runs from Dracula to M. R. James and the Hammer horror films. Read one story tonight and you'll see why horror writers still borrow from him.
Looking for more writers like him? Browse our collection of classic authors and find your next favorite.
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