In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World's Classics)

Some books are so bad that you just can't finish them. This isn't one of those books. Which is unforunate as when you read it you constantly wish you weren't. It's just so average. It doesn't have the ability to sweep you back into the Victorian world that a Dickens, Collins or Conan Doyle does. The ghost stories are not at all spine-chilling. They just feel very tepid. Le Fanu also falls into the habit of a lot of 19th Century writers of constructing incredibly arcane, unnecessarily-long sentences, meticulously grammatical at the expense of clarity, and separated by so many commas that by the time one reaches the end of the sentence, should one manage to hold one's attention to that point, one has already forgotten what was being conveyed at the sentence's beginning.

However I reserve my strongest condemnation for the notes. First* of all I* find it extremely distracting* to read when every other* word is marked* with an asterisk*. What confounded my annoyance is that the editor finds it necessary to explain words and concepts which really do not need explaining. So you think he has something of importance to explain and stop your reading to turn to the notes, search for the relevant point and then are left irritated as he tells you that such-and-such was written very slightly differently in an earlier version or defines a term that any fool would understand.

So why did I finish it? I think it has merits in having a place in the history of gothic fiction. Le Fanu occasionally finds interesting concepts and every now and then has a clever turn of phrase. But overall I would say this was a disappointing read, and if it had been a modern novel snobbery probably would have made me put it down.

read on... (2/2 people found this helpful)

This is a superb collection. Green tea is probably the least good but still good. The Familiar is a great tale of a man haunted by his past and eventually destroyed by it. Mr Justice Harbottle is very endearing and one of my favourite ghost stories. The Room in The Dragon Volant is long but well worth it - what could have been the perfect crime, if only...Carmilla, the vampire tale, is to my mind superior to Stoker's overlong Dracula, and was its inspiration.

An Apt Title. (8/8 people found this helpful)

Whatever the merits of Le Fanu's collection of short stories, the Wordsworth edition is dismal.

The typesetting errors are so frequent that it was only after some investigation that I began to believe that mine is not a bootlegged copy. The most common faults are wandering sem;i-colons, and all exclamation marks replaced with a space followed by a personal pronoun I this can cause confusion when placed in the middle of a sentence, as Le Fanu's old prose does not include capital letters following an exclamation mark.

Undoubtedly cheap, but only really worth it as an excercise in deciphering.

Five of Le Fanu's longer short stories (2/2 people found this helpful)

'In a Glass Darkly' is a collection of hair-raising tales selected from those recorded by Dr Martin Hesselius during the many years he spent working to understand and explain the seemingly supernatural incidents that came to his attention. The stories are:

1) 'Green Tea' - a clergyman believes himself persecuted by a malevolent monkey.

2) 'The Familiar' - an ex-naval captain is threatened by an aggrieved ghost from his past.

3) 'Mr Justice Harbottle' - a respectable gentleman is driven from his lodgings by the activity of a mean old judge who has been dead for some years.

4) 'The Room in Le Dragon Volant' - a rich English man on tour becomes enmeshed in an extraordinary scam whilst travelling from Brussels to Paris.

5) 'Carmilla' - the daughter of an English father, living in a schloss in Styria, is befriended by a young lady who has unusually needle-sharp teeth.

As Henry James quite rightly suggested, Le Fanu's stories are the ideal reading material after the chimes of midnight. These five stories provide a wonderful chill before snuggling down to sleep. They are longer than the tales in Le Fanu's 'Madam Crowl's Ghost' collection, where the stories are between 10 and 25 pages in length. The tales in this collection vary in length between about 30 and 100 pages.

I recommend 'In a Glass Darkly' to anyone who enjoys old-fashioned ghost stories.

superficial tales- real or imagination? (4/7 people found this helpful)

The classic in the ghost story genre. Most of his
followers as M.R. James or E.F. Benson admitt that they were highly inspired by J.S. LeFanu. One
of his main works where his fame comes from is "In a glass darkly" wherein five ghost stories are told by a german doctor/analyst. LeFanu leaves it to the reader to decide weather the incidents were real or the main characters suffer from brain damages.

In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World's Classics)

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Reader Reviews:

Probably only scary if you suffer from a nervous psychological disorder (0/1 people found this helpful)

read on... (2/2 people found this helpful)

An Apt Title. (8/8 people found this helpful)

Five of Le Fanu's longer short stories (2/2 people found this helpful)

superficial tales- real or imagination? (4/7 people found this helpful)

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