This early work by Sheridan Le Fanu was originally published in 1872. Born in Dublin in 1814, he came from a literary family of Huguenot origins; both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights,
These short stories were written in the 19th century and are all set in Ireland. Fanu was renowned for his ghostly stories and himself came from a talented literary family. He was related to Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
»The Dead Sexton« is a short story by L. Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1871. JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU [1814-1873] was an Irish mystery and horror author. He had an enormous influence on the horror genre in the 19th and 20th century, especially through his championing of tone and effect rather than shock factor. Among his most noted work is the lesbian vampire novella Carmilla [1872] and mystery Uncle Silas [1864].
IT was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I'd been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I'd boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn't made me fatter, and I didn't see why my luck should ever turn. It did though—or I thought so at the time. A Mrs. Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, "Why, Hartley," says she, "I believe I've got the very place for you. Come in to-morrow and we'll talk about it."
Madam Crowl's Ghost and the Dead Sexton was written in the year 1871 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. This book is one of the most popular novels of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and has been translated into several other languages around the world. On the evening before the tragedy came to light--trifles are always remembered after the catastrophe--a boy, returning along the margin of the mere, passed him by seated on a prostrate trunk of a tree, under the "bield" of a rock, counting silver money. His lean body and limbs were bent together, his knees were up to his chin, and his long fingers were telling the coins over hurriedly in the hollow of his other hand. He glanced at the boy, as the old English saying is, like "the devil looking over Lincoln." But a black and sour look from Mr. Crooke, who never had a smile for a child nor a greeting for a wayfarer, was nothing strange.