What do you think?
Rate this book
Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland
'This brilliant book, with rich materialat its disposal, links the life and the work; and without any forcing.' Irish Times
- GenresBiography
Paperback
First published March 20, 1980
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 1, 2018
McCormack performs a literary analysis-cum-biography of the Anglo-Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in the pursuit of filling gaps in the 'tradition' (though he disputes it) of Anglo-Irish writing. The author is profoundly dismissive of especially Le Fanu's later fiction on the grounds of an absence of formal symmetry; Uncle Silas is judged by McCormack to be by far his greatest work on this and other bases, and it merits significant analysis in the main part of this book - all others are really subordinate to it. The insistent value judgments that McCormack makes on Le Fanu's fiction is quite wearying, and at moments I genuinely couldn't fathom why he had decided to pursue a biography of an author whose work he finds to be, excepting a few cases, without much merit (personally, such a view seems somewhat inflated - even Le Fanu's more unwieldy productions are fascinating). Equally, though the discussions of Irish history, including some profoundly divisive issues, seem even-handed, McCormack can't resist ending his analysis without scorning the 'retarded condition of Irish society' and its 'delayed evolution' (258) of the novel form vis-á-vis the English; if there's any fragment of truth to this description, it really needs more nuance than he gives it (that is, the very agency of the English in bringing about such a state).
December 28, 2024
I rather enjoyed this one. It's a literary biography that combines textual analysis, Irish political history, and a personal history of Le Fanu and his family members garnered from personal correspondence and historical documents. Each of the three aspects are illuminating, but McCormack's skill lies in the way he charts how the turbulence of Ireland's past influenced Le Fanu's unsettling works. There's a fair amount of bias in the way he dismisses certain novels (while raving about UNCLE SILAS, for him a clear personal favourite, for instance), but that doesn't get in the way of this biography's appeal.
March 13, 2025
A fabulous and very thorough resource. Required reading for Le Fanu scholars.
April 9, 2022
Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by W. J. McCormack (2nd Ed., Dublin 1991) is an excellent look at one aspect of 19th century Ireland.
This aspect is the thin layer of petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the "Protestant ascendancy" in Dublin during the rise of an Irish national consciousness. McCormack does a fine job with the toing and froing and unique historical contingencies of this cohort.
McCormack is also invaluable in discussing the fiction, long and short, created by LeFanu. His chapter on Uncle Silas is admirably thorough.
LeFanu was a writer in a period of interregnum: he was a sober and moderate conservatiive aware of the need for his ruling class to trim its sales and avoid showdown with the stirring Irish majority. (Thus, he wrote in Dublin novels aesthetically retarded by their English settings and attempts to curry favor with London publishers link Bentley.)
_______
Full:
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2022...
This aspect is the thin layer of petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the "Protestant ascendancy" in Dublin during the rise of an Irish national consciousness. McCormack does a fine job with the toing and froing and unique historical contingencies of this cohort.
McCormack is also invaluable in discussing the fiction, long and short, created by LeFanu. His chapter on Uncle Silas is admirably thorough.
LeFanu was a writer in a period of interregnum: he was a sober and moderate conservatiive aware of the need for his ruling class to trim its sales and avoid showdown with the stirring Irish majority. (Thus, he wrote in Dublin novels aesthetically retarded by their English settings and attempts to curry favor with London publishers link Bentley.)
_______
Full:
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2022...
Want to Read
August 12, 2015Sehr geschichtslastig und nicht gerade mitreißend geschrieben.
Oft sind es die "Randinformationen", die mir die liebsten sind, z.B. über den Phoenix Park:
"Everyone recognizes Joyce´s dark enquiries in Finnegans Wake as an exploration of the unconscious mind, and a public park may seem curious as a choice of imagery. But in his first novel, Le Fanu acknowledged that the park too had a past, a history less orderly than its modern playgrounds and promenades. The hero of THE CLOCK AND ANCHOR, wandering on the outskirts of Dublin sometime early in the eighteenth century, becomes ensnared in the park:
"The close screen of the wild gnarled thorns which covered the upper level on which he now moved, still further deepened the darkness; and he became at length so entirely involved in the pitchy gloom, that he dismounted, and taking his horse by the head, led him forward through the tangled brake, and under the knotted branches of the old hoary thorns - stumbling among the briers and the crooked roots, and every moment encountering the sudden obstruction either of some stooping branch, or the trunk of one of the old trees,; so that altogether his progress was as tedious and unpleasant as it well could be."
Le Fanu convincingly translates the open playground of his childhood back into the ensnaring wildness of its past."
Oft sind es die "Randinformationen", die mir die liebsten sind, z.B. über den Phoenix Park:
"Everyone recognizes Joyce´s dark enquiries in Finnegans Wake as an exploration of the unconscious mind, and a public park may seem curious as a choice of imagery. But in his first novel, Le Fanu acknowledged that the park too had a past, a history less orderly than its modern playgrounds and promenades. The hero of THE CLOCK AND ANCHOR, wandering on the outskirts of Dublin sometime early in the eighteenth century, becomes ensnared in the park:
"The close screen of the wild gnarled thorns which covered the upper level on which he now moved, still further deepened the darkness; and he became at length so entirely involved in the pitchy gloom, that he dismounted, and taking his horse by the head, led him forward through the tangled brake, and under the knotted branches of the old hoary thorns - stumbling among the briers and the crooked roots, and every moment encountering the sudden obstruction either of some stooping branch, or the trunk of one of the old trees,; so that altogether his progress was as tedious and unpleasant as it well could be."
Le Fanu convincingly translates the open playground of his childhood back into the ensnaring wildness of its past."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews