FORGOTTEN BOOK: UNCLE SILAS

 Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1864)

I'm cheating here because I have never read this book.  Lord knows I have tried.  Four or five times over the past decades.  This is not to knock the book, nor its writer.  I am a big fan of Le Fanu's writing and have read and enjoyed all of his shorter works.  But Uncle Silas...something has always arisen and interrupted my reading of the novel...a family emergency, a conflict in my work schedule, or merely my misplacing my copy of the book...always something.  Is the universe conspiring against me?  i don't know.  But, damn, I really want to read the book.  Some day I finally will.

The book was based on/Le Fanu's story "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" (1839; also published as "The Murdered Cousin" in Le Fanu's Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851).  The novel, which moved the setting of the story from Ireland to England, was first printed as a serial, "Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas," in the Dublin University Magazine in 1864; it was then published as a three-volume novel (because that's what they did back in those days) later that year.  Uncle Silas has remained Le Fanu's best-known novel, and rightly so.

From Wikipedia:  "Uncle Silas, subtitles 'A Tale of Bartram Haugh,' is an 1864 Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu.  Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the novel has also been hailed as a work of sensation fiction by contemporary reviewers and modern critics alike.  It is an early example of the locked-room mystery subgenre, rather than a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic...It was the source of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Firm of Girdlestone. and remains a touchstone for contemporary mystery fiction."  The influence of Uncle Silas is obvious in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White; perhaps it's the other way around -- the Collins novel was published a few years before Uncle Silas, bit well after the Le Fanu genesis story (unsolicited plug:  Collins' best novel; don't believe the naysayers who tout for The Moonstone.)

Uncle Silas relates the tale of young Maud Ruthyn, who grows close to her uncle. Silas Ruthyn, the family black sheep who had been a noted  rake and gambler and now professes to be a reformed and devout Christian.  In the past, Silas had been suspected to be involved in the suspected suicide of a man to whom Silas owed a great deal of money, a suicide which took place in a locked room in Silas' mansion at Bartram-Haugh.  Maud's father suddenly dies and a codicil in his will places her with Uncle Silas as her guardian until she reaches her majority.  If Maud should die before them her estate would pass to Uncle Silas... 

(I am torn between who is more evil, Uncle Silas or Wilkie Collins' Count Fosco.  I'm leaning toward Fosco but will reserve full judgement until I finally read the Le Fanu book.)

Le Fanu (1814-1873) is considered a central figure in the development of the modern ghost story.  M. R. James (no slouch in the field himself) consider Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories."  Le Fanu was also a major influence in the development of the mystery novel.  Among his best-known works are the stories "Green Tea," "Schalken the Painter," "Carmilla" (which I covered in this blog yesterday), "The Familiar," "Mr. Justice Harbottle," the sensation novels Wylder's Hand, The Wyvern Mystery, The Rose and the Key, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.  and of course, Uncle Silas.

Uncle Silas has been filmed at least five times, and three adaptations have aired on BBC Radio.