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A Lost Name
This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published by: R. Bentley in 1868 in 323 pages; Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh;
Hardcover
First published October 1, 1977
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About the author
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
1,255 books1,364 followersJoseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M.R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 28, 2015
A Lost Treasure
Mark Shadwell, the squire of Raby Hall, feels himself the victim of circumstances and society: Fettered to his invalid wife Amy, who idolizes him but for whom he has hardly any regard, and encumbered with debts, surrounded by neighbours on whom he looks down but who fare better than he does, he thinks that he is wasting his life and his talents – of whose existence he is deeply convinced – in the middle of nowhere. Bitterness and sloth, however, hinder him from changing his living conditions and from taking his life into his own hands. News of an impending visit of his distant kinsman Sir Roke Wycherly, an affluent profligate, add to his worries because there is no love lost between the two men and Mark cannot imagine why Sir Roke would take the trouble to spend some days at Raby Hall, out in the sticks. Sir Roke’s arrival finally seems to throw some light onto that question for Mark fancies that his elderly relative is taking some interest in his daughter Rachel and soon the father begins to build castles in the air, on the basis of the prospective wealth that a marriage between Sir Roke and Rachel would mean for Mark. All of a sudden, however, he makes a discovery that causes his dreams to bust like a bubble, and this discovery has to do with the inscrutable Agnes Marlyn, his daughter’s governess, to whom the unsavoury Mark has been making secret advances. When finally Sir Roke is found cruelly murdered in his chamber, an old family prophesy seems to fulfil itself, namely that the curse on the Shadwell family, which was brought about by a jealous wife’s suicide, is going to take its effect.
It would be quite difficult to go into further detail on the plot of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s A Lost Name (1868) without giving away too much of the mystery. Le Fanu is often regarded as a mere writer of sensational novels and horror stories and has even been likened to Wilkie Collins although nothing could be farther from the truth in that Le Fanu is a master of style and tone where Collins, at least to my taste, is more fixated on his plots and more often than not rather tedious in the way he draws them out into novel-length. Le Fanu often reworked ideas and plots from earlier stories into novels – a bit like Raymond Chandler –, and he also did so when writing A Lost Name: Here he used his short story The Evil Guest, included in his Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), a story which itself was a slightly altered version of his novella Some Account of the latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran (1848). It may be argued, however, that although the author himself considered A Lost Name to be one of his best works, it sometimes suffers from being an expanded short story or novella in that there are some rather lengthy passages that add hardly anything substantial to the story at all and instead try the reader’s patience – especially whenever Reverend Stour Temple’s brother Roger appears. Apart from that, the murder does not happen before you are halfway through the book, and the crime and the process of clearing it up are not even at the focus of the novel, which did not matter to me, however, since the novel had a lot to offer. For starters, I always enjoy Le Fanu’s particular style, his ability to paint a melancholy landscape in a few strokes and to evoke the supernatural and to maintain a certain ambivalence as to whether it can be traced to natural causes or not. In this case, you will be asking yourself if the fall of the House of Shadwell is due to the old family curse or to its last representative’s vices. Be that as it may, A Lost Name is probably more than a mere sensational novel since it seems to whisper a memento mori on nearly every single page, and it is very impressive how vehemently Sir Roke, the rake, reacts to the vicar’s intimations that in the middle of life we are in Death’s hand.
Another aspect of the novel that impressed me was the way Le Fanu gives depth and dimension to his characters, who are full of contradictions, nuances and irresolution. Even the vicar, one of the more positive characters, is criticized by the omniscient narrator for his moral arrogance, and there were times when I felt genuine sympathy for Mark Shadwell although his behaviour is very despicable most of the time. Then there is Agnes Marlyn, the femme fatale, who is characterized in such depth that you would expect her to leap out of the book any moment. Eventually, I was so fascinated with the characters that I did not even mind waiting for the murder for such a long time.
To conclude, here are some samples of memorable quotations from A Lost Name, which may be lengthy at times, but was still a very good read for me:
”Many fat good-humoured fellows smile at hell, if they do not sneer. And many bad men class it with Styx and Tartarus – a bugbear and a fable. Eating, drinking, dozing, comfortable friend! Willing to take a luxurious view of your Creator, and to make the day of judgment a good-natured sham. God is good, you say; it cannot fare so ill with us. He is the God of love and of mercy, and of every good and pleasant thing. Alas! and most certainly He is also the God of every evil thing – the God of pain, of madness, and of death. Look around on the gloom of this transitory world. If here and there is a broken light of heaven, are there no glimmerings and shadows of hell? Are there not the hospitals, the madhouses, the prisons, the graveyards?”
“Life is a bird in the hand, which, if you let it fly, never returns.”
[About Sir Roke, who is going to be buried] “now that his patron was going to that formal and protracted supper, after the manner of Polonius, where the chief guest is not active but passive […]”
“Her heart was full of bitterness; but she did not burst into tears, as young ladies under a sense of wrong usually do in the seclusion of their rooms. Perhaps the tenderness of early parental love, and the habit of being pitied, are needed to induce that relief, and Agnes Marlyn had no home affections to look back to, and had never enjoyed the luxury of being pitied. And so her training had steeled her against the necessities of sympathy, and the habit even of pitying herself.”
“The memory of pain is short-lived. Retrospect is sunny; the best days always in the past. The illusion runs beyond our own short lives, into other centuries, among buried generations; and we look on their relics as those of a golden age, when times were plentiful, and men all kind, and women beautiful, and heads and hearts never ached.”
[One of Shadwell’s tenets] “Christianity is simply a philosophy which has survived other and better ones, just because it has condescended to ally itself with the principle of superstition, which is part of human nature.”
[Carmel Sherlock on the Bible] “As good philosophy as you’ll find anywhere, and more ancient. I like it. I always look into it. Why should the Bible be the only book we can take nothing out of? There is something in every book – every ancient book – written when it was troublesome to write, and no one read but the critical.”
Mark Shadwell, the squire of Raby Hall, feels himself the victim of circumstances and society: Fettered to his invalid wife Amy, who idolizes him but for whom he has hardly any regard, and encumbered with debts, surrounded by neighbours on whom he looks down but who fare better than he does, he thinks that he is wasting his life and his talents – of whose existence he is deeply convinced – in the middle of nowhere. Bitterness and sloth, however, hinder him from changing his living conditions and from taking his life into his own hands. News of an impending visit of his distant kinsman Sir Roke Wycherly, an affluent profligate, add to his worries because there is no love lost between the two men and Mark cannot imagine why Sir Roke would take the trouble to spend some days at Raby Hall, out in the sticks. Sir Roke’s arrival finally seems to throw some light onto that question for Mark fancies that his elderly relative is taking some interest in his daughter Rachel and soon the father begins to build castles in the air, on the basis of the prospective wealth that a marriage between Sir Roke and Rachel would mean for Mark. All of a sudden, however, he makes a discovery that causes his dreams to bust like a bubble, and this discovery has to do with the inscrutable Agnes Marlyn, his daughter’s governess, to whom the unsavoury Mark has been making secret advances. When finally Sir Roke is found cruelly murdered in his chamber, an old family prophesy seems to fulfil itself, namely that the curse on the Shadwell family, which was brought about by a jealous wife’s suicide, is going to take its effect.
It would be quite difficult to go into further detail on the plot of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s A Lost Name (1868) without giving away too much of the mystery. Le Fanu is often regarded as a mere writer of sensational novels and horror stories and has even been likened to Wilkie Collins although nothing could be farther from the truth in that Le Fanu is a master of style and tone where Collins, at least to my taste, is more fixated on his plots and more often than not rather tedious in the way he draws them out into novel-length. Le Fanu often reworked ideas and plots from earlier stories into novels – a bit like Raymond Chandler –, and he also did so when writing A Lost Name: Here he used his short story The Evil Guest, included in his Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), a story which itself was a slightly altered version of his novella Some Account of the latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran (1848). It may be argued, however, that although the author himself considered A Lost Name to be one of his best works, it sometimes suffers from being an expanded short story or novella in that there are some rather lengthy passages that add hardly anything substantial to the story at all and instead try the reader’s patience – especially whenever Reverend Stour Temple’s brother Roger appears. Apart from that, the murder does not happen before you are halfway through the book, and the crime and the process of clearing it up are not even at the focus of the novel, which did not matter to me, however, since the novel had a lot to offer. For starters, I always enjoy Le Fanu’s particular style, his ability to paint a melancholy landscape in a few strokes and to evoke the supernatural and to maintain a certain ambivalence as to whether it can be traced to natural causes or not. In this case, you will be asking yourself if the fall of the House of Shadwell is due to the old family curse or to its last representative’s vices. Be that as it may, A Lost Name is probably more than a mere sensational novel since it seems to whisper a memento mori on nearly every single page, and it is very impressive how vehemently Sir Roke, the rake, reacts to the vicar’s intimations that in the middle of life we are in Death’s hand.
Another aspect of the novel that impressed me was the way Le Fanu gives depth and dimension to his characters, who are full of contradictions, nuances and irresolution. Even the vicar, one of the more positive characters, is criticized by the omniscient narrator for his moral arrogance, and there were times when I felt genuine sympathy for Mark Shadwell although his behaviour is very despicable most of the time. Then there is Agnes Marlyn, the femme fatale, who is characterized in such depth that you would expect her to leap out of the book any moment. Eventually, I was so fascinated with the characters that I did not even mind waiting for the murder for such a long time.
To conclude, here are some samples of memorable quotations from A Lost Name, which may be lengthy at times, but was still a very good read for me:
”Many fat good-humoured fellows smile at hell, if they do not sneer. And many bad men class it with Styx and Tartarus – a bugbear and a fable. Eating, drinking, dozing, comfortable friend! Willing to take a luxurious view of your Creator, and to make the day of judgment a good-natured sham. God is good, you say; it cannot fare so ill with us. He is the God of love and of mercy, and of every good and pleasant thing. Alas! and most certainly He is also the God of every evil thing – the God of pain, of madness, and of death. Look around on the gloom of this transitory world. If here and there is a broken light of heaven, are there no glimmerings and shadows of hell? Are there not the hospitals, the madhouses, the prisons, the graveyards?”
“Life is a bird in the hand, which, if you let it fly, never returns.”
[About Sir Roke, who is going to be buried] “now that his patron was going to that formal and protracted supper, after the manner of Polonius, where the chief guest is not active but passive […]”
“Her heart was full of bitterness; but she did not burst into tears, as young ladies under a sense of wrong usually do in the seclusion of their rooms. Perhaps the tenderness of early parental love, and the habit of being pitied, are needed to induce that relief, and Agnes Marlyn had no home affections to look back to, and had never enjoyed the luxury of being pitied. And so her training had steeled her against the necessities of sympathy, and the habit even of pitying herself.”
“The memory of pain is short-lived. Retrospect is sunny; the best days always in the past. The illusion runs beyond our own short lives, into other centuries, among buried generations; and we look on their relics as those of a golden age, when times were plentiful, and men all kind, and women beautiful, and heads and hearts never ached.”
[One of Shadwell’s tenets] “Christianity is simply a philosophy which has survived other and better ones, just because it has condescended to ally itself with the principle of superstition, which is part of human nature.”
[Carmel Sherlock on the Bible] “As good philosophy as you’ll find anywhere, and more ancient. I like it. I always look into it. Why should the Bible be the only book we can take nothing out of? There is something in every book – every ancient book – written when it was troublesome to write, and no one read but the critical.”
May 29, 2018
A fantastic, unfairly ‘forgotten’ book by this author. It’s full of amazingly drawn characters and a doom laden atmosphere, and unlike many books from this period, it maintains your interest throughout. Probably the best book that I have read so far from this author.
February 5, 2018
Leisurely, claustrophobic sensation novel with Gothic overtones (think of the author's Uncle Silas). Mark Shadwell is the occupant of Raby Hall, and an aspiring, pessimistic philosopher, and maintains an emotional detachment from his daughter, Rachel, and wife, Amy. They are joined by the enigmatic governess Agnes Marlyn, and a nervous diathetic (with an obession for the viola) called Carmel Sherlock. The story follows the intrusion into their lives by Mark's cousin, Sir Roke Wycherly.
Le Fanu is perhaps unsurpassed in being able to generate a tense and foreboding atmosphere; in this aspect, A Lost Name is easily the equal to Uncle Silas. Characterization is inconsistent - the Temple family, Rachel, and Amy are only loosely drawn, while Agnes is perhaps the finest paining I've seen of the governess type; I was (pleasantly?) surprised by the direction of Mark's character, with which Le Fanu doesn't rest on his laurels - the elder Shadwell continues to develop throughout, and his morality is disturbingly ambiguous.
The plot is something of a let-down, however; I fully suscribe to the idea that readerly expectations should never be entirely met in a novel of this kind, but A Lost Name, especially nears its end, neglects to bring some of its developments to an adequate conclusion.
Le Fanu is perhaps unsurpassed in being able to generate a tense and foreboding atmosphere; in this aspect, A Lost Name is easily the equal to Uncle Silas. Characterization is inconsistent - the Temple family, Rachel, and Amy are only loosely drawn, while Agnes is perhaps the finest paining I've seen of the governess type; I was (pleasantly?) surprised by the direction of Mark's character, with which Le Fanu doesn't rest on his laurels - the elder Shadwell continues to develop throughout, and his morality is disturbingly ambiguous.
The plot is something of a let-down, however; I fully suscribe to the idea that readerly expectations should never be entirely met in a novel of this kind, but A Lost Name, especially nears its end, neglects to bring some of its developments to an adequate conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews