Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 200th birthday

Today is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 200th birthday. Some devotees are currently doing a walking tour of Dublin starting at his birth place at 7am (as near to his birth time as they could estimate), visiting locations important to his life and stories, and ending up at his burial vault in St Jerome's cemetery.

Methinks it's time for a re-read of "Carmilla".

That reminds me - I haven't finished reading the 3rd Green Book, largely on Le Fanu. I'll have a go this evening and look for some of his stories that I haven't read.

Brian J Showers is live tweeting the Le Fanu trail with the hashtag #LeFanu. He has posted some nice photos.

>1 pgmcc:,4 Thanks for the heads up, really am liking the twitter pics. I suppose tonight I'll have to read a tale or two from In a Glass Darkly.

I'll get on with reading Uncle Silas.

I would love to visit St Jerome's to pay my respects to the great writer himself. Le Fanu is such an influential writer and deserves as much praise as Stoker for his contribution to Gothic literature. Carmilla is incredibly ahead of its time. A firm favourite of mine.

There is a Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu seminar in Trinity College next Wednesday and Thursday.

On Wednesday evening a radio play production of Green Tea is being performed in Toners pub on Baggot Street.

M.R. James held him in high regard.

>11 frahealee: 'Is the book in fact called In A Glass Darkly but there are only five stories contained in it, with none bearing the actual title?'

Yes, that's right. Carmilla is novella length (in between a short story and a full length novel) but because it's more well known I think it has been published separately too which might be why you'd thought it was a novel.

This wikipedia article might help with some of the background to the collection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Glass_Darkly

>11 frahealee:

That's right, there isn't a story called "In a Glass Darkly".

"Carmilla"'s a long story (a novelette or novella?) and has sometimes been published separately, but it s also one of the stories comprising In a Glass Darkly. The stories in the book are: "Green Tea", "The Familiar", "Mr Justice Harbottle", "The Room in the Dragon Volant", "Carmilla".

I don't know if the book is included in your ebook collection, or possibly you only have the individual stories, so I'd just mention that there is some connecting material written for this volume, to make it more of a coherent work. Obviously you'd be missing that is the stories are only provided separately.

>11 frahealee:

Something else to be aware of is that a number of Le Fanu's stories appear more than once, under different titles and rewritten to a greater or lesser extent (often the scene of the action is moved from Ireland to England, for English magazine publication).

>12 souloftherose:>13

I was a little hesitant about using the "novelette/novella" terminology because I don't know what exactly the difference is. Years ago I read an explanation of how the old pulp magazines used it simply as a measure of word count - the sequence being short-short story, short story, novelette, novella, novel (which last would be serialised) - but I can't remember the actual numbers; on the other hand I'm sure I've seen academic writing ascribing greater structural differences to the different terms, such that a long short story that doesn't do certain things isn't a novelette, it's just a long short story :)

>16 housefulofpaper:, >18 frahealee: Yeah, I'm not 100% sure if there's an agreed definition of novella across all forms of fiction - I think there's a definition for science fiction and fantasy award based on word count (maybe originating in the old pulp magazines?). Anyway, a long short story or short novel I guess.

This conversation has reminded me that I never finished reading this collection and this seems a good time of year to pull it off the shelf and have another go so.....

>19 souloftherose: >16 housefulofpaper: >18 frahealee: My reading of the history of novel, novella, novelette, long short story, short story, etc... is as @souldoftherose suggests, not definitive. If you go back to the 1960s and earlier what was called a novel then would now be called a novella. I think some people have put arbitrary wordcounts on each category and tried to put this down as definitive convention.

I have a collection of short stories collated in the first half of the twentieth century in which the editor discusses the length of stories and what constitutes a short story and what a novel. He concluded that there are really only short stories and novels. I think these length determinants of story length are of use to publishers who want to produce books of a given size and marketers who want to have a clear message to communicate. It is the same as the whole world of genre, sub-genre, sub-sub-genre, and so on and so forty. A story is a story. It is a certain length. Categorisation into genre or length category has its use as far as it helps people find what they like and how much time they want to spend reading it. Some of the stories I have enjoyed most defy categorisation into a category and if I were to only read clearly defined genres I would never have found these wonder full books. Oh, yea, some of them were short and some of the long. :-)

For the purposes of the Nebula awards, the definitions are:

Novel — 40,000 words or more
Novella — 17,500–39,999 words
Novelette — 7,500–17,499 words
Short Story — 7,499 words or fewer

Unfortunatly, I'm from a country where word count is little used, and have very little intuition what those word counts mean in practice.

(I do note that the weekly read over in The Weird Tradition - Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness - is 40,881 words and would by these criteria just barely qualify as a novel.)

'Novelette' is a new one on me - I think I was quite unaware of it. Now life is not as simple as it used to be. I used to simply call it a novella if I couldn't figure out if it was a short story or a novel - don't know what I'll do now ...

>11 frahealee: - Uncle Silas is calling ...

I've just been surprised to find we haven't got an Uncle Silas thread - I remember discussing it at length here. I shall make one.

I have spent the weekend manning The Swan River Press table at Octocon. It is dedicated to the Gothic and supernatural and was inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. In the picture can be seen a copy of “Reminiscences of a Bchelor” and “The Complete Ghost Stories of Chaplizod”.

>24 pgmcc:
I've got those books! I hope you were able to get away from your post sometimes and enjoy the rest of the convention.

>25 frahealee:
I set a hare running there, didn't I! It's obvious, when you think about it, that magazine editors would have had to look at the material they were buying in terms of how many pages each item would take up.

>22 alaudacorax: Elvis Costello uses 'novelette" in a lyric somewhere...no idea what he was implying by using the term...

>28 frahealee:

I don't think Iris Murdoch is a Gothic writer, although that's based on what I've read about her. I've only read her first novel Under the Net (apparently a slightly uncharacteristic novel, quite heavily influenced by the French existentialists).Later novels use quite Gothic-y or melodramatic tropes, I understand, without feeling like Gothic novels...using the plot devices but doing quite different things with them. I have seen the film version of A Severed Head from 1970-ish and I can see Gothic bits of (stage) business in it, as it were, but also social comedy and bedroom farce...and who knows what layers of subtlety got lost in the process of adaptation?

She had a knack for a strikingly dramatic title, though!