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A Rolling Stone Vol. II
At all Booksellers. — J. S. Le Fanu's Novels
At all Booksellers.
J. S. Le Fanu's Novels.
Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh.
“We cordially recommend this remarkable novel to all who have leisure to read it, satisfied that for many a day afterwards the characters there portrayed will haunt the minds of those who have become acquainted with them. Shakespeare's famous line, ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep,’ might be altered for the occasion, for certainly Uncle Silas has murdered sleep in many a past night, and is likely to murder it in many a night to come, by that strange mixture of fantasies like truth and truths like fantasies, which make us feel, as we rise from the perusal, as if we had been under a wizard's spell.”—The Times.
“The first character is Uncle Silas, that mysterious man of sin; the next is the ghoul-like goblin of a French governess—the most awful governess in fiction. Then we have the wandering lunatic whom we take for a ghost, and who is even more dreadful. Finally, there is the tremendous scene in the lonely Irish house. No one who has read it can forget it, or the chapters which precede it; no one who has not read it should have his pleasure spoiled by a description.”—The Daily News.
The House by the Churchyard
“Joseph Sheridau Le Fanu was one of the best story-tellers that ever wrote English. We protest that, as we write, one fearful story comes to our mind which brings on a cold feeling though we read it years ago. The excitement is so keen that any one but a reviewer will find himself merely ‘taking the colour’ of whole sentences in his eagerness to get to the finish. His instinct is so rare that he seems to pick the very mood most calculated to excite your interest. Without explnation, without affectation, he goes on piling one situation on another until at last he raises a perfect fabric. We know not one improvisatore who can equal him.”—Vanity Fair.
“Mr. Le Fanu possessed a peculiar—an almost unique—faculty for combining the weird and the romantic. His fancy had no limit in its ranges amongst themes and images of terror. Yet he knew how to invest them with a romantic charm which ended in exerting over his readers an irresistible fascination.”—The Daily News.
In a Glass Darkly.
“Yet even Uncle Silas, being less concentrated, is less powerfully terrible than some tales in Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly. This book was long as rare as a first edition copy of Le Malade Imaginaire. Lately it has been reprinted, and is published in one volume by Mr. Bentley. It is impossible, unhappily, for an amateur of the horrible to remain long on friendly terms with any one who is not charmed by In a Glass Darkly. The eerie inventions of the author, the dreadful, deliberate, and unsparing calm with which he works them out, make him the master of all who ride the nightmare. Even Edgar Poe, even Jean Richepin, come in but second and third to the author of In a Glass Darkly. His Carmilla is the most frightful of vampires, the Dragon Volant the most gruesome of romances; while A Tale of Green Tea might frighten even Sir Wilfrid Lawson into a chastened devotion to claret or Burgundy. No one need find Christmas nights too commonplace and darkness devoid of terrors if he keeps the right books of Le Fanu by his pillow. The author is dead, and beyond our gratitude. I cast lilies vainly upon his tomb—et manero fungor inani.”—From a leading article in The Daily News.
London
Richard Bentley & Son, New Burlington ST.
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.