In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World's Classics)

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. (4/4 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 (0/0 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? (4/6 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.

The best of le Fanu (8/8 people found this helpful)

This is a collection of uncommon merit, and readers will no doubt enjoy such stories as 'Mr Justice Harbottle' quite as much as the renowned vampire tale 'Carmilla'. But to those unfamiliar with the fourth story, 'The Room in the Dragon Volant' one can only say that this haunting, plangent masterpiece is likely to be the most memorable of all. This book contains the best of le Fanu's tales, better than 'Madame Crowl's Ghost', and represents the apogee of Victorian ghostly fiction.

In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World's Classics)

Sheridan Le Fanu

Reader Reviews:

read on... (0/0 people found this helpful)

An Apt Title. (4/4 people found this helpful)

Five of Le Fanu's longer short stories (0/0 people found this helpful)

superficial tales- real or imagination? (4/6 people found this helpful)

The best of le Fanu (8/8 people found this helpful)

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