The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Please post any background information about the author of the book which you think might be useful and relevant to the reading. Please provide spoiler warnings when necessary.

This is a nice surprise! I'd completely forgotten we had Carmilla tucked away to bring out in December :-) looking forward to a good dose of Gothic discussion.

I meant to make an announcement to remind everyone of this read, but I had been busy. And I did not really have time to put together an official schedule, so being a short read I just decided to post all the threads. I am looking forward to this one myself, have been wanting to read it for a while. Glad to have you joining in the discussion.

I wonder how le Fanu got away in 1872 with implying lesbianism in the relationship of Carmilla and Laura. He was either very bold or very foolish.

Rochelle wrote: "I wonder how le Fanu got away in 1872 with implying lesbianism in the relationship of Carmilla and Laura. He was either very bold or very foolish."

There is implied lesbianism in in The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

And I'm surprised that both were published.

Rochelle wrote: "And I'm surprised that both were published."

Quite!

I'm currently working my way through some of the English lit options on the Saylor MOOC course, and one of them is on Gothic literature.

I've just come across this description of Gothic literary conventions in the course material, and thought it might be interesting to compare it with our reading of Carmilla while and after reading:

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Structure of Gothic Convention." The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno, 1980).

Surely no other modern literary form as influential as the Gothic novel has also been as pervasively conventional. Once you know that a novel is of the Gothic kind (and you can tell that from the title), you can predict its contents with an unnerving certainty. You know the important features of its mise en scene: an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a Catholic or feudal society. You know about the trembling sensibility of the heroine and the impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrranical older man with the piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them. You know something about the novel's form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories. You also know that, with more or less relevance to the main plot, certain characteristic preoccupations will be aired. These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; discovery of obscure family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes and silences; unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel-house and the madhouse. The chief incidents of the gothic novel never go far beyond illustrating these few themes, and even the most unified novel includes most of them.

Wow-that sounds just like The Woman in White that we read earlier. It also sounds a lot like the recent spate of Vampire novels.

Frances wrote: "Wow-that sounds just like The Woman in White that we read earlier. It also sounds a lot like the recent spate of Vampire novels."

I think Wilkie Collins used many of the Gothic conventions in his novels, Frances. In theory, what takes them a step further is that he set them in his own times and in his own society, which gave the Gothic novel a new frisson and - hey presto! - the sensational novel was born. However, perhaps Le Fanu is an in between phase: his characters (I think) are of his own time, but the settings are definitely Gothic.
What remains to be seen as we read Carmilla is whether there is a logical explanation for the uncanny (à la Collins) or whether there are really supernatural forces at work...

J(oseph) Sheridan Le Fanu was born in 1814 and died 1873. He was a journalist, newspaper proprietor, as well as a writer of novels and tales of mystery. He came from a well-educated Dublin family of Huguenot origins. He was connected by marriage to the Sheridans.

After graduating Trinity College (Dublin) Le Fanu was called to the bar, but never practiced. By 1840 he had published more than a dozen stories in the Dublin University Magazine which was founded in 1833 by a group of Trinity college men.

His earliest novels were in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott and Ainsworth. Three years after his wife's death, his writing became more gothic. He was one of the best sellers of the 1860's thru the 1880's. In 1888, Henry James wrote: "There was the customary novel of Mr. Le Fanu for the bedside; the ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight".

His reputation has steadily risen and is now considered an equal of Wilkie Collins as a writer of mysteries, and as occupying a place of his own in the field of the sinister and the supernatural.

I found a nice edition via Amazon which had a great intro. One of the items really stressed in this intro was the fact that science was taking over the thought processes instead of religion. The tension between science vs. religion, which we still have today, is apparent in this particular novella.