Irish gothic horror writer known for works including Uncle Silas and Carmilla also invested in newspapers in Dublin

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

The 200th birthday of writer Sheridan Le Fanu has been celebrated in a Google Doodle.

Irish writer Le Fanu was as a pioneer of gothic horror literature whose greatest successes came late in his career.

He is perhaps best remembered for the works Uncle Silas, Carmilla, which was written a quarter of a century before Bram Stoker's Dracula, and In a Glass Darkly.

As Times Higher Education reported, in Uncle Silas, he "devised ways of presenting society as a code involving both opposites and identity, with the female narrator's pious father morphing into her wicked uncle".

Besides his own writing, Le Fanu had financial interests in newspapers, including the Statesman, the Dublin Evening Mail and the Dublin University Magazine.

Marking his birthday, the Irish Times wrote: "Le Fanu greatly pushed out the boundaries of the Victorian ghost story. He was a meticulous craftsman who combined the contemporary Gothic literary conventions with his own realistic technique to produce stories with psychological insight and supernatural terror.

"He did not seek to produce a 'shock horror' effect but often left important details unexplained, which added to the mystery."

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