Ireland during Le F an u ’s lifetim e was a deeply divided society. At the top was the dom inant Protestant A nglo-Irish minority, the Ascen
dancy, the descendants o f Protestants who had come from England in Elizabethan tim es to form the land-ow ning elite and the middle class o f the country. The m ajority o f the rest o f the population was Catholic o f the native Celtic stock, m ost living in the countryside, m any still speaking Gaelic (Irish), a large num ber o f them mired in poverty. 1 Anglo-Irish literature, appearing in 1800 and lasting until
At the turn o f the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after a rebellion of the Irish in U lster, Protestants from Low land Scotland w ere brought as
Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish W riter and Innovator 183 the middle o f the twentieth century was predom inately the literature of the dom inant class, although there were notable representatives from the Catholic m ajority am ong them in its initial stages (W elch
1996: 13-15; M oynahan 1995: 253-256).
The first phase o f Anglo-Irish literature, when the A scendancy stood at its high water mark, did not reflect the narrow perspective and interests o f the dom inant class, but from the very start was concerned with Ireland as a whole. This view was established by Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) who in 1800, with the publication o f her novel Castle Rackrent initiated A nglo-Irish literature. Castle Rackrent is the story o f the decline and fall o f an A nglo-Irish landowning family, in many ways a family like her own. The story is told by Thady Quirk, a Catholic peasant and one o f the fam ily’s loyal retainers. Thady tells o f the fam ily’s fortunes from his own point o f view, in his own way and above all in his own words. W ith this novel, says Julian M oynahan, Edgeworth created “A nglo-Irish litera
ture in a single stroke” (M oynahan 1995: 49).
Maria Edgeworth not only set the tone o f Anglo-Irish literature;
she also created the national novel as a distinctive subgenre. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote in the introduction to his Waverly Novels that his wish was to describe personalities o f his native Scotland “in some distant degree to em ulate the adm irable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgew orth”, and in 1829 in a preface to a collected edition o f his novels, Scott wrote that he had attem pted in his work “something o f the same kind that Miss Edgew orth so fortu
nately achieved for Ireland.” Ivan Turgenev also looked to Edge- worth as an example, allegedly saying that her stories inspired his A Sportsman's Sketches. Both Scott and Turgenev, observes Robert Wolf, were themselves landmarks o f national fiction (W o lf 1979: v- vi).
Maria Edgeworth was followed in that tradition by writers such as Charles Robert Maturin (1767-1849), Samuel Lever (1797-1868) and Charles Lover (1806-1872), all from the Dublin middle class, as well as Anne Marie Hall (Mrs. S. C. Hall 1800-1881) who was bom in Dublin but grew up in County Wexford, and at the end o f the century by Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville, 1858-1949 and settlers to N orthern Ireland. Known as Ulster Scots, this distinctive group forms another segment o f the general population.
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Violet M artin, pen name M artin Ross, 1862-1915) w riting after the A scendancy had lost it dom inant position.
Anglo-Irish literature, how ever, was not entirely Protestant. In its first years it also included w riters from the C atholic farm er and lower m iddle class such as M ichael (1796—1874) and John (1798-1842) Banim, Gerald G riffin (1803-1840) and W illiam Carleton (1794—
1869), authors who knew the Irish peasantry well and who made them and their lives center pieces o f their novels and short fiction.
Carleton in particular was intent on depicting the Irish “character” in the m ost realistic term s, telling the reader in the preface o f Traits and Stories o f the Irish Peasantry that “His desire is neither to distort his own countrym en into dem ons, nor to enshrine them as suffering innocents and saints - but to exhibit them as they really are.”
C arleton did know his countrym en well. He was born and raised in the north o f Ireland, in a G aelic-speaking zone, a speaker both of English and Gaelic, a student o f the Hedge Schools o f rural Ireland and well acquainted with peasant life and with the long tradition of Irish oral storytelling. His father in fact was a well known storyteller and local historian and his m other a singer o f Irish songs. When som eone once observed that his stories seemed more authentic than Mrs. S. C. H all’s Irish Sketches, Carleton replied, “O f course, they are! Did she ever live with the people as I did? Did she ever dance and fight with them ? Did she ever get drunk with them as I did?”
(Schirm er 1984: 23)
A uthenticity has been described as “the project o f an Irish im aginative literature in English resting on the authentic account”
first established by M aria Edgew orth and followed ever since by w riters on both sides o f the hyphen (M oynahan 1995: 51). Authenti
city and realism , however, were not restricted to Anglo-Irish litera
ture. Realism had characterized, indeed defined, the novel as a genre since its inception in the early eighteenth century. Realism was strengthened in European literature by the rom anticism and nationa
lism that prevailed during the nineteenth century, not just as a literary m ovem ent but also in the form o f a broad cultural movement with powerful political consequences, a m ovem ent that emphasized the comm on man, the distant past and the m anner, beliefs and oral traditions o f folk societies. Folklore scholarship and literature flourished together at that time throughout Europe and especially in Ireland. In fact, folklore scholarship and literature were so
intert-wined in Anglo-Irish letters that to understand one, we m ust also understand the other.
In 1827 Thomas Crofton Croker published the first collection o f folktales in the British Isles titled Fairy Legends o f the South o f Ireland, narratives he had heard and had written down while in that part o f the country, and that he later edited in literary form for publication. His book attracted the attention o f Sir W alter Scott as well as the Grimm Brothers, the founders o f folklore scholarship, and within a year a German translation had appeared. Folklore studies in Ireland evolved over the century from literary' adaptations of orally transmitted tales and legends, like those o f Croker, into a scholarly discipline requiring the accurate recording o f oral narra
tives directly from the inform ant’s lips and the careful and syste
matic archiving o f the data collected.
Patrick Kennedy, John O ’Hanlon, Jeremiah Curtin and W illiam Larminie were important figures in the developm ent o f Irish folklore studies, as were William Wild and his wife Jane Francesca “Speran- za” (parents o f Oscar Wilde who did not share their enthusiasm ).
Douglas Hyde at the end o f the century was the first to include the names o f informants and their location in his collections, publishing his material in the Irish original with parallel English translations. In 1935 another folklore scholar, James H. Delaney (known also as Seamus О Duilerga) founded the Irish Folklore Com m ission which, as of 1996, had in its archives 50,000 pages o f oral transcription and 10,000 hours o f audio recordings (W elch 1996: 264; Dorson 1966: v- xxxii).
The interrelationship between folk studies and literature reached its high point in the late flowering o f Anglo-Irish literature known as the Literary Revival (1890 to 1922). Am ong the writers o f that movement were George Russell, William Butler Yeats, John M ilton Singe and Lady Augusta Gregory. Revival authors however focused so intently on the unity o f the intellectuals and the peasantry that they ignored the Catholic middle class. The result was growing hard feelings between the two, reaching their high point when Synge’s attempt at authenticity and honesty in his play Playboy o f the Western World so offended middle class propriety and the middle class sense of national honor, that riots broke out in the Abbey Theater when the play was first produced.
Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish W riter and Innovator 185
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James Joyce (1882-1941), son o f a middle class Catholic family, was the first Catholic w riter since Carleton to enter the scene. He was critical o f Revival authors not for their honesty, but for what he considered their excesses. His w ork took a different direction from theirs, exerting an influence that has reached far beyond the shores o f Ireland. Joyce’s work, however, was still deeply grounded in Irish life, attentive to Irish sentim ents and perspectives and sensitive to the genuine Irish voice.
Sheridan Le Fanu lived and w rote in the first h alf o f that rich literary tradition. Like other w riters o f the time he was attuned to Irish lore and speech, not ju st that o f his native Dublin but also of County Limerick where his family moved when he was a child.
2Like others o f his tradition Le Fanu was also interested in folklore.
In June 1836 he published an article in the Dublin University Magazine titled “Scraps o f Hibernian B allads” (later included in The Purcell Papers) in which he wrote o f “the pleasurable and patriotic duty o f collecting together the many, m any specim ens o f genuine poetic feeling, which have sprung up like flowers, from the warm though neglected soil” o f Ireland. And like other Anglo-Irish writers Le Fanu wove Irish characters and settings into his fiction, although he used far fewer folk them es in his stories than did others o f that tradition.
Looking back to his work Elizabeth Bowen says that “the point of view, the evaluation, the mood, the dilem m as” o f Le Fanu’s fiction, even when set in England, “are all H ibernian.” “His Ireland”, she says, “was far from being ‘stage Ireland’, it was the Ireland as he knew her to be, for better or w orse” (Bow en 1968: v ii-v iii; 1947: 8).
Le Fanu’s work can thus be best understood and appreciated when the author is viewed as an Irish w riter within the Anglo-Irish tradition em ploying Irish motifs, characters, m ood, setting and the folk speech. It is, however, his place in the fiction o f the supernatural that we recognize his most im portant contribution.
See the m em oires o f W illiam Le Fanu, Sheridan Le F anu’s brother for a description o f the fam ily’s years in Lim erick.
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