page_title: Sheridan Le Fanu
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Sheridan Le Fanu / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Childhood home of Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) and located in the old village of Chapelizod, Dublin city. Photographed by Damien Slattery
context_page_description: Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a 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.
context_section_description: Sheridan Le Fanu was born at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family of Huguenot, Irish and English descent. He had an elder sister, Catherine Frances, and a younger brother, William Richard. His parents were Thomas Philip Le Fanu and Emma Lucretia Dobbin. 
  Both his grandmother Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were playwrights (his niece Rhoda Broughton would become a successful novelist), and his mother was also a writer, producing a biography of Charles Orpen. Within a year of his birth his family moved to the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, where his father, a Church of Ireland clergyman, was appointed to the chaplaincy of the establishment. The Phoenix Park and the adjacent village and parish church of Chapelizod would appear in Le Fanu's later stories.
  In 1826 the family moved to Abington, County Limerick, where Le Fanu's father Thomas took up his second rectorship in Ireland. Although he had a tutor, who, according to his brother William, taught them nothing and was finally dismissed in disgrace, Le Fanu used his father's library to educate himself. By the age of fifteen, Joseph was writing poetry which he shared with his mother and siblings but never with his father. His father was a stern Protestant churchman and raised his family in an almost Calvinist tradition.
  In 1832 the disorders of the Tithe War (1831–36) affected the region. There were about six thousand Catholics in the parish of Abington and only a few dozen members of the Church of Ireland. (In bad weather the Dean cancelled Sunday services because so few parishioners would attend.) However, the government compelled all farmers, including Catholics, to pay tithes for the upkeep of the Protestant church. The following year the family moved back temporarily to Dublin, to Williamstown Avenue in a southern suburb, where Thomas was to work on a Government commission.
caption: Inspiration for The House by the Churchyard
exif: {"Image Make": "Sony Ericsson", "Image Model": "W995", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "R1HA035     prg1215-7995_GENERIC_HI 00.00", "Image DateTime": "2013:10:14 16:38:21", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "2304", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Rotated 90 CW", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "23718", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "11311", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/125", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "64", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:10:14 13:25:40", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:10:14 13:25:41", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Cloudy weather", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "91/20", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1714", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2285", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "23536", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "66D65D4C6C114435A5E5FCE357E25067", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "4048"}