IRISH GOTHIC

Irish Nightmares: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Rewriting of the Famine

Nationalism and “The Mysterious Lodger” (1850)

A gothic castle —

A search for great nationalist Irish writers usually reveals names like Seamus Heaney, John Millington Synge, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. That of ghost story writer extraordinaire (Joseph) Sheridan Le Fanu, however, is conspicuously missing. Perhaps this is because literary scholars have tended to assume that Le Fanu was an inveterate Unionist who supported Ireland as a part of the Union with England, Scotland, and Wales given his Anglo-Irish Tory background.

Here, I want to question this assumption by examining one of Le Fanu’s creepiest yet overlooked stories published in the wake of the “Great Hunger” or Irish famine, “The Mysterious Lodger” (1850). A frightening tale of an uncanny and deadly visitor, its plot, themes, and imagery nonetheless deliver an oblique rationale for Irish independence especially when closely read in the contexts of nationalist discourse on the British handling of the famine between 1845 and 1850.

A photo of Sheridan Le Fanu from 1873. Photographer unknown —

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