Grolier Club exhibition: "Imaginary Books."

Sheridan Le Fanu.

On view until February 15, 2025, and online is the exhibition "Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books" at the Grolier Club in New York City. These are nonexistent works that appear in other works. Mysteries include "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" by John H. Watson and Death 'Twixt Wind and Water by Harriet Vane. Vane's study of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu and Lord Peter Wimsey's scholarly works also are featured. I was most tickled to see The History of Ancient Egypt by famed irascible Egyptologist Radcliffe Emerson (first mentioned in Elizabeth Peters' The Deeds of the Disturber).

Wordsworth blog: Collins, Le Fanu.

"These two figures crossed the floor diagonally." Illustration from Sheridan Le Fanu's "Mr. Justice Harbottle," Harper's Bazaar, February 1872. NYPL

Catching up with the blog on the Wordsworth Editions website:

• David Stuart Davies discusses the career of Wilkie Collins: "Remarkably, The Moonstone received a somewhat cool reception from the critics. Even Collins’s friend Dickens was of the opinion that, ‘The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of the readers.'"
  
  
• Stephen Carter examines the work of legendary Irish ghost story writer Sheridan Le Fanu: "Le Fanu’s reputation was crowded out of Victorian literature by his contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontës; all of whom he in some form influenced and whose sales he frequently rivalled."

I'm looking forward to Davies's upcoming post on Edgar Wallace.

Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance, 1947).

Katina Paxinou, left, and Jean Simmons, right, with 
producer Laurence Irving on the set of Uncle Silas, ca. 1947

Based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas features a young heiress (Jean Simmons) whose nefarious uncle (Derrick De Marney) is prepared to take drastic measures to gain control of her fortune.

More on "Best of" lists.

On the Times Literary Supplement blog, Michael Caines discusses the

Amelia B. Edwards, from
Harper's Magazine. NYPL

100 Best Novels list from 1898 that was created by editor-critic Clement K. Shorter, placing it alongside David Bowie's more recent list (Bowie's selections include Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Edward Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni). The privileging of dead authors over living ones on such lists also is discussed.
There are quite a few books on Shorter's list that may provoke head scratching among today's readers, but Shorter does include the following:

• Gothic milestones The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho (by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe respectively)

• Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley (maidservant solves crime; see also Dante Gabriel Rossetti's drawings of characters from this work)

• Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

• Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas

• Amelia B. Edwards's Barbara's History (Edwards was a successful novelist before she became a cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund and an inspiration for Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody Emerson)

Gothic triumphs: Valancourt's top sellers for 2010.

Sheridan Le Fanu,
from Seventy Years of
Irish Life (1893) by
William Richard Le Fanu

For those who enjoy seeing a different bestseller list, here are the Top 10 Sellers for Valancourt Books for 2010:

1.  Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1871–72); great-nephew of Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan

2.  The Blood of the Vampire by actress-author Florence Marryat (1897)

3.  Six Gothic Dramas by Scottish poet-playwright Joanna Baillie

4.  The Witch of Ravensworth by George Brewer (1808)

5.  The Necromancer by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1794)

6.  Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater (1885)

7.  Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul by Marie Corelli (1897)

8.  Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793)

9.  The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (1778)

10. The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

Valancourt reissues Sheridan Le Fanu's first novel.

Valancourt Books has reissued Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's The Cock and Anchor (1845), which is, according to Stewart M. Ellis's Mainly Victorian, "an excellent 'costume' romance of old Dublin in the eighteenth century, abounding with exciting adventures, highway robberies, murders, and hair-breadth escapes" (144). Le Fanu (1814–73), famous for his supernatural tales, was the great-nephew of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The School for Scandal, etc.) and, according to the Dictionary of National Biography (1892), was "a man of handsome presence and great charm of manner" (397).

About the image: Title page from Le Fanu's The Cock and Anchor (illus. Brinsley Le Fanu, London: Downey, 1895).

Fangs for the memories.

Valancourt Books has just reissued Florence Marryat's Blood of the Vampire (1897, published the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula). It features Harriet Brandt, "daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess," who seems to have a curiously lethal effect on those around her.

Actress, operatic singer, playwright, and spiritualist Marryat (1837–99) produced more than 50 books over the course of her lifetime.

Also new from Valancourt: Marie Corelli's Ziska (1897), "a supernatural tale of reincarnation, seduction, and revenge"; Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72); and Richard Marsh's rare short story collection Both Sides of the Veil (1901). (BTW, Marsh' s grandson, the late horror writer Robert Aickman, celebrates a birthday tomorrow.)

About the image: A rendering of Florence Marryat from her acting days. New York Public Library.

Gothic bestsellers from Valancourt Books.

For those who like to see a different bestseller list, here is one for Valancourt Books to date for 2009:

1. The Witch of Ravensworth by George Brewer (orig. publ. 1808)

2. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (orig. publ. 1872)

3. The Veiled Picture; or the Mysteries of Gorgono by Ann Radcliffe (orig. publ. 1802)

4. The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker (orig. publ. 1890; Stoker's first novel)

5. Six Gothic Dramas by Joanna Baillie (orig. publ. ca. 1851)