Published in three volumes in 1863, this was the last of Le Fanu’s novels to be set in the past (and in Ireland) and the first to be published under his own name. It was initially serialised in the Dublin University Magazine from October 1861 to February 1863, under the pseudonym Charles de Cresseron. Indeed, most of Le Fanu’s subsequent novels were first published in that periodical, which he owned and edited from 1861. The book version of the novel was self-published by Le Fanu, but he was able to sell a number of copies to the London publisher Tinsley, who soon reissued it under their own imprint. It was Le Fanu’s most successful novel up to that point and is still one of his better known works.
The story opens with a prologue describing the discovery of a violently beaten skull in the churchyard at Chapelizod, near Dublin, and the narrator then takes us back in time to 1767, as he imagines the events that might explain the skull’s condition. As might be imagined from this description, the ensuing plot is an intriguing mix of the supernatural and the sensational with a realistic depiction of life in a mid-nineteenth-century Irish village.
Le Fanu spent his youth in Chapelizod, near the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, and drew on his impressions of that village for the setting of this novel and some of his ghost stories, one of which (‘Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand’) is incorporated in the narrative of this novel. The book was later an important reference point for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which contains cryptic allusions to the novel.