The Antiquarian Eye:

Le Fanu, M.R. James, and the Ghost Story’s Quiet Revolution

From the Unquiet Silence "A letter once a month, drawn from the quiet, but never still"

A companion to bl-literarymagic.com

Pictured: my visit to The King’s School, Canterbury, to view the original manuscript of “Oh, Whistle” along with friends Dan and Thom—it’s Thom’s Instagram post pictured—I’m the Cheshire Cat sitting left

My dear literary spirit,

Those of us who traffic in ghost stories tend to share a private admiration for those few who turned the form into something deeper than anecdote. Among these, M.R. James remains unsurpassed. But Monty—no less than any of us—had his influences, and chief among them was Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

It is pronounced similarly to laugh anew.

It was Le Fanu who first prized what I’ve elsewhere called mythic distance: the measured placement of the tale in a comfortably bygone age. In “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” a seventy-year-old narrator recalls the events of her thirteenth year. In “The Dead Sexton,” the tale is still told “by winter firesides,” handed down with the “mellowing influence of years.” This antiquarian approach—where narrators are often grandsons of eyewitnesses or anonymous inheritors of old stories—allowed Le Fanu to pair gothic atmosphere with the subtle claim of veracity. That sense of removed-yet-authentic testimony was not lost on James.

Monty famously observed that we “listen more readily” to ghost stories “if the narrator poses as elderly, or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.’” In both writers, time is not simply backdrop; it is the mechanism by which belief is made possible.

Le Fanu also experimented—sometimes clumsily, often brilliantly—with narrative structure. In “Squire Toby’s Will,” the opening paragraphs offer us a seemingly random wayfarer atop the York-to-London coach. This unnamed narrator recounts, in detail, the dreams, visions, and inner thoughts of characters who lived in a manor he passes on the trip, people with whom he never came or comes into contact. It’s illogical. It violates narrative sense. And yet, Le Fanu preferred this bizarre first-person narrative to a far more logical third-person omniscience. Why? Because the personal voice, even a baffling one, conveys immediacy. It feels closer to truth.

James understood this. He admired “Squire Toby,” editing it into his 1923 collection, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, and praised its “excellent qualities.” And he restructured it into his own tale, “The Tractate Middoth.” That same insistence on the obscure narrator—awkwardly inserted (sometimes), casually anonymous (always)—reappears in James’s own works, where a lightly sketched antiquarian or unnamed “I” provides just enough authority to deliver the tale, but never enough to clarify it.

Le Fanu, as suggested, had a distinct flair for the improbable and even attempted to create medical explanations for supernatural events in his tales. In a Glass Darkly (1872) introduces Dr. Martin Hessalius, a Swedenborgian physician who classifies hauntings as psychological ailments. In “Green Tea,” the Revd Mr. Jennings is tormented by a red-eyed demon-monkey. Hessalius blames the clergyman’s diet. In “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” he declares an entire household to have fallen victim to “clairvoyant contagion,” the result of their inner eyes briefly opening in unison. The diagnoses are absurd—but intentionally so. By the time of In a Glass Darkly, Le Fanu seems to mock the very rationalism he once upheld. Science becomes patter. Spectres remain unclassified, and perhaps that is the point. Le Fanu could be satirizing science rather than spiritual belief, and he remains coy about revealing which is his intended target.

James, though circumspect in questions of the occult, was not blind to its fictional necessity. He admired “Green Tea” and even borrowed from it in his “Casting the Runes,” though he noted the Le Fanu tale was “not quite” a ghost story, neither is “Runes.” He regarded Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” the best ghost story ever written and, again, borrowed from it in his final-and-posthumously published tale, “A Vignette.” These tales haunted him not because they resolved, but because they refused to.

Where Le Fanu’s spirits are agents of moral retribution—Furies in spectral dress—James’s hauntings unfold from the merely unfortunate: a man opens a manuscript, disturbs a whistle, glimpses an engraving. Le Fanu’s ghosts pursue. James’s ghosts emerge.

This contrast is not accidental. Le Fanu writes of guilt. James writes of transgression. One is Catholic at its root (although Le Fanu was not). The other, Anglican. One punishes sin. The other warns the curious.

And yet both, in their way, trust in the effect of reticence. As James put it: “The object is to mystify and alarm,” nothing more. But the reader, suspicious of simplicity, looks again . . . curiously!

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: The first ghost story

New posts arrive the first of every month at 08:30 Eastern and will be reproduced here shortly afterwards.

You can support my work by subscribing for free to receive new posts in your inbox on the 1st of every month by following this link: https://professorlitmagic.substack.com/