A Shadowed House of Mirrors: Obsession, Love, and Death in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘In A Glass Darkly’

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 short story collection In a Glass Darkly includes some of the author’s most notable contributions to the Victorian Gothic literary tradition, including the pseudo-psychological “Green Tea” and vampiric “Carmilla,” but the collection is more than the sum of its parts. Approaching In a Glass Darkly holistically, employing a blend of close reading, psychoanalytic theory, short story theory, and historicism to tease out the intertextual relationships between the included works and the frame story reveals an overarching theme of pathological and destructive obsession, which presents in “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” and “Mr Justice Harbottle” as obsessive guilt and in “The Room in the Dragon Volant” and “Carmilla” as obsessive love. Suicide, particularly of the hero, is also established as a recurring pattern. Reading these works as pieces in conversation with one another identifies a metastory that is told through the choices Le Fanu made in selecting and sequencing them: one in which malevolent forces insidiously invade domestic spaces, and psychological dysfunctions masquerade as supernatural entities, relentlessly haunting the protagonists—often with disastrous results. The historical record presents compelling parallels in the mental illness and premature death of Le Fanu’s wife, Susanna Bennett Le Fanu. This analysis presents the possibility that In a Glass Darkly can be read as a requiem for Susanna, and identifies a methodology that could be usefully employed when approaching other volumes of short fiction published under authorial direction.